the delphic expanse

My word count is off. By five.

My last drabble, I ran a word count after I wrote it, it says I've got 100 words.

But after uploading it to Warp 5 Complex, their count says 95. So I went back and counted the words by hand, and sure enough there are only 95.

Any idea what would cause this or how to fix it?

Thanks.

All word counters are a little different. Variances can happen if they count hyphened words or numbers. Some word counters count words by number of characters rather than actual words. Some count ellipses, some don't.

You can always use:

http://www.wordcounttool.com/


I had the same issue - when I uploaded a drabble I wrote in Pages - W5 said it was 102 words. I didn't count to see which one was more "correct."

It's might be the hyphenated words, ellipses, etc., that it's counting differently. I would expect that an ellipses that has a space before and after it might be counted as a word. Or could it possibly be extra spaces in line form farther down at the end of the story? I always make sure to delete any extra spaces at the end.

My recent drabble count, which I wrote on Open Office, was 100, and Warp 5 also said 100.

It's the darndest thing. There are no ellipses, no hyphenated words. I checked the document for extra spaces--none. And it's still insisting there are 100 words against my count (and Warp 5's) of 95.

That's truly weird. You said there were no ellipses, but the only other thing I could think of is that there might have been spaces within the ellipses.

Example...

vs.

Example . . .

in which case, it might have counted each period as a word instead of recognizing it as punctuation? I don't know. Just grasping here. After my earlier post, I wondered if that might have been one instance.

Mistress Euclid, did you upload the file to Warp 5 as an HTML file? If you did, then it might have counted format code as words. There can be code there that you can't see (think Word Perfect without "reveal codes").

This issue is a major deal for medical transcriptionists who get paid on production. Clients want all kinds of fancy formats, but they don't want to pay for the keystrokes to implant those format codes because they can't always see the codes, just the results. They want to pay only for the characters they see, and preferably not the spaces (because there's nothing there).

Well, it just happened to me, too. Open Office said I had 100 words on a drabble, but when I posted at Warp 5, it came up 96. I counted, and sure enough, 96.

Guess I'm going to have to count the words from now on. Good thing it's only supposed to be 100 words.

I ran into a similar issue with the drabble I did last night - the tool I was using said 100 - but the count turned out to be 96.

However, this tool said 96:

http://www.wordcountertool.com/

I'll have to try that counter on my next drabble.

It's possible that something called "text segmentation" is tripping it up. Different word processors use different algorithms to determine what is a word and what isn't. It's not quite as simple as it seems. For example: One program may count "can not" as ONE word in the English language, whereas another may be more literal and use that space delimiter to count it as two words.

Another possibility - and I'm totally guessing here - but I suspect Warp 5's word count program is probably "wc", a Unix-based program that reads the input from a file and spits back the number of bytes, 'newlines' and character or word count. It works differently from the word processing programs do word counts and if it's an older version of wc it might be getting confused if there's an Unicode present in the file (these are multi-byte characters). It could be that a quotation mark or a comma is throwing it off.

Try this. Copy from Open Office and paste it into something like SimpleText or Text Edit. "Save as TXT". (Not RTF.) Open it up, copy it into both Warp 5 and back into word and see if the counts match now.