Word Count validator

Crap, haha. I use dashes a lot, and never with spaces.

That probably explains why my word count was about fifty short... oh well. I still winned.

MS Word told me I had 50,020 and NaNo said 50,066. Whatever, I'll take it.

Also, has anyone noticed a difference in word counts with MS Office 2007, and any word documents made backwards-compatible? 2007 gives me a slightly higher word count than any copies of a document read in compatibility mode.

I'm told MS Word counts a single # character as a word. It would be nice to know the exact algorithm for how various things count words. I can see a single dash as being between a 'single word' such as heebie-jeebies, but a word count should also take a double dash as a words separator--typed, the doule-dash means a printer's M or "Em" dash, which indicates a pause in a sentence, as between "separator" and "typed" in this sentence.

Maybe I can go through every word count function I can think of and figure out exactly how each counts words, and write a blog entry on it, and it could become really popular among (other) NaNoWriMo'ers. Anything to avoid actually writing fiction...

I use AP editing guidelines, which place spaces between the em (or en, as you prefer) dash and its linking words, so no worries there for me.

I don't think I have very many dashes at all in my text, though.

I had quite a few dashes, actually, and I put spaces between them because I knew how it counts.

Plus, it looks weird to me without a spaces between the dash and the words.