This article explains how to double space lines, paragraphs, and the entire document in Microsoft Word. There are four ways to double space lines in Microsoft Word. You can use any of these options to modify a few lines or the entire document in Word.

Double Space Lines From the Home Tab

This is the quickest way to double-space your document. You can use this when you want to add double spaces for only part of the document. Select the paragraphs you want to change and follow the steps below.

  1. Open Microsoft Word.
  2. Go to the Home > Paragraph group > Select the Line and Paragraph Spacing icon.
  3. To double space lines, choose 2.0 from the dropdown.
  4. For more spacing options, select Line Spacing Options in the list.
Double space from Home tab in Word

Double Space Between Paragraphs From the Design Tab

Modify the vertical space between paragraphs in your document by setting the spacing before or after each paragraph. Do note that this applies spacing throughout your entire document and also affects line spacing. It gives you less scope to control line spacing than the other methods here.

  1. Open Microsoft Word.
  2. Go to Design > Paragraph Spacing and choose Double.
Paragraph Spacing in Word

Double Space Lines From the Page Layout Tab

Use this option to set up double spaced lines before you start adding content to your document. The settings here allow you to finetune your text with other options.

  1. Open Microsoft Word.
  2. Go to the Page Layout tab.
  3. Go to the Paragraph group. Click the tiny down arrow in the bottom right corner to bring up the Paragraph settings dialog.
  4. Stay on the Indents and Spacing tab.
  5. Click the down arrow next to the Line spacing box.
  6. Select Double and click the OK button to exit the dialog box.
Selecting double space between lines from the layout tab

Double Space Lines With Styles

Do you write double spaced essays? You can save this as a special style in Word for only essays or modify an existing style.

  1. Open Microsoft Word.
  2. Go to the Home > Styles group. Right-click Normal.
  3. Select Modify from the drop-down menu.
  4. Under Formatting, click the Double Space button.
  5. Select OK.
Modifying a style with double line spacing in Word

What Does Double Spaced Lines Mean?

Line spacing is nothing but the height of the space between each row of text. A double space means sentences will have a blank line equal to the full height of two lines of text between each line. By default, most word processors have single spacing enabled (or slightly more than single spacing), which is space that’s just one line high. Word has a default line spacing of 1.08.

Line spacing is an important style consideration and just one of the ways to format your text for better legibility.