Hello all, I hope you're well.
Do you think text editors give us a correct word count? I thought so. Until, I accidentally discovered otherwise.
A while ago, I had to count the total number of words in Moby Dick’s first chapter. (Moby Dick is an American novel written by Herman Melville.)
To get that number of words I tried Google Docs first; it gave me a word count of 1655 words. Next, out of curiosity, I tried Apple’s Pages which gave a word count of 1679 words. Then, out of even more curiosity, I tried Grammarly which reported 1648 words.
I was puzzled. And I ended up counting words by hand (for the curious it came out to be 1663 words–not the same as text editors’).
It’s possible that different vendors use a different, and not same, definition of a word. How do you handle spaces in text, how do you handle dashes or en-dashes or even em-dashes; all this matters.
Also, the problem of parsing all kinds of formatted text looks simple but it’s not.
All this made me interested in the word-count problem :). So I developed a simple online Word Counter. I don't think it's perfect but I'll try to fix things as I find them.
If you come across an issue please let me know. I'll try to solve it soon.
I hope you find it useful. Take care!
Word Counter
Word Counter
Word Counter