Different word processing software will give you a different word count in the very same document. I look at some of the variations today, in my How To column at Copyediting.com.
I created a very short document to test how the software counted a variety of constructions. Below is a chart showing the actual test contents and how each item was counted by the word processor.
| Element | Counted as | |||||
| Word | Google Doc | Txt | Pages | LaTeX* | PDF* | |
| COUNT | 50 | 54 | 56 | 54 | 64 | 57 |
| header | 0 | 0 | 0 | |||
| footer | 0 | 0 | 0 | |||
| comments | 0 | 0 | 0 | |||
| counts — | 1 | 2 | 1 | |||
| time-stamp | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||
| cat&dog | 1 | 2 | 2 | |||
| she’d | 1 | 1 | 1 | |||
| 3[nonbreaking]F | 2 | 1 | 2 | |||
| 8–9 | 2 | 1 | 2 | |||
| 8-9 | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||
| 3.14 | 2 | 1 | ||||
| teacher–author | 2 | 1 | 2 | |||
| dash — spaced | 2 | 3 | 2 | |||
| or—not | 2 | 1 | 2 | |||
| slash/unspaced | 1 | 2 | 2 | |||
| slash / spaced | 2 | 2 | 2 | |||
| http://www.url.ca | 1 | 4 | 4 | |||
| —30— | 1 | 1 | 1 | |||
| –#– | 2 | 2 | 0 | |||
| picture | 0 | n/a | n/a | |||
| caption | full, including “figure #” tag | |||||
| symbols © ™ | 1@ | 1@ | 0 | |||
| math + 10 ÷ 8 ½ | 6 | 6 | 4 | |||
| text box | 0 | 0 | yes | |||
*Content was exported from the PDF and LaTeX documents because those systems don’t have built-in word counters. Since this is something you might have to do, it was worth testing it anyway.
