Word Count Validator - Actual Word Count

Is the word count validator accurate? On my Word document, the word count is 34,050 but when I cut and pasted it on the validator, it said 60,000! Not that I mind but I which one is correct?

Thanks!

As Chris noted on the Breaking News, there are some small variations, 100 words in a full 50,000 word manuscript is fully within the realm of possibility.

As for doubling the expected word count ... um, try it again. Perhaps you pasted it in there twice by accident? (Make sure you do it before the day rolls over or else your graph will look wonky - you can correct it manually if you wish.)

When I copy my novel from Microsoft Word 2007 to the copy/past validator here, I get exactly the same number. In the past, it's been off by 10 to 50 words. Largely this is due to formatting. For example, if you write the following:

I was there...and then I left.

You will get SIX (6) words.

But, if you instead have:

I was there... and then I left.

You will get SEVEN(7) words.

The difference? The space after the elipsis (which you're technically suppsoed to have anyway). Similarly, if you use en-dashes (not hyphens) to break up sentences:

He came running -- more quickly than he had ever run before.

You need the space around the en-dash to get the count; without the space, you'll be short a word.

So, if you're fifty words short, is it possible that you are using punctuation without the spacing after it? Also, some word processors will incorrectly count hyphenated words as two words. For example, twenty-six is one word, but some word processors will count it as two (we count it as one).

Does this help explain where the differences might be?

I used Microsoft Works Word Processor on Window XP Home Edition

The difference between Word's word count and validator was 1.

Word said I had 43004
Validator said I had 43005

I say that was pretty close.

It works for me.

I DID paste mine twice - D'oh!

It's only off by one now. Thanks a bunch!

I'm off by about 30 words or so. Word '07 gives me 36050 and the validator gives me 36019. I'm relieved that it isn't any larger.

I don't know why, but I'm out by about a thousand or so words :o
Is that supposed to happen?

For the record, Google Docs seems to agree very closely with the Word Count Validator: 27,332 vs 27,291. I can handle a loss of 41 words out of 27k. :)

Nine times out of ten, this is going to be caused by punctuation or spacing issues. Check over your document, and see if you have unspaced ellipses, em dashes, or hyphens. The word counter counts the spaces between words.
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Heather Dudley
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Have you read our Codes of Coduct for the forums yet?

**Never mind**
8-)
(it was that pesky "Submit" button all along!)

Amazingly enough, with 94K+ words, NaNo and MSWord are only 4 words different!

Gah, I totally forgot about dashes. I use em-dashes in my novel—which aren't supposed to have a space like en-dashes are. I'll have to Find & Replace to correct that just for word counting purposes.

Impressively, OpenOffice.org 3 and the official word count were identical—both before and after I made that change.

Out by 1334 words, and I do not use unspaced dashes, dots, ellipses etc.

Could be a bug: http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/node/3119803#comment-3296588

It is a bug with OpenOffice and custom quotes.

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=89042

Of course, y'all could just use the Unix `wc' command (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wc_(Unix)) to count your novels. As far as I'm aware, that's still what the word count validation program uses. I used it to count my novel locally and got 50131, and 50132 on the server.

Not sure where the extra word came from, but hey, at least I don't have to worry about being massively out come time to validate!

The validator shorted me almost 350 words from what MS Word 2002 lists. I'm sure this is well within the margin of error for the different word count styles (and I'm in no danger of not winning because of it) but it still makes me sad.

Validator: 83,072
Word: 83,415

That extra word is a weird little bug that's been hanging around since last year. And I have no idae where it comes from.
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Heather Dudley
Forums Moderator - Broke? You can still donate!
Have you read our Codes of Coduct for the forums yet?

The validator shorted me 3500 words! I'm on a Mac, using MS Word for Mac. I use en-dashes and spaced ellipses, but good heavens, even if I missed some it wasn't that many! Any suggestions?

I am a noob, and to this end I have not found the word count validator. What am I missing ?? Thanks.

Go to My NaNoWriMo. Click on Edit Novel Info. There's a box, near the top, called Word Count Validator into which you can paste your entire novel. Then, once it is pasted, click the Submit button at the bottom of the page.

Thank you, thank you and thank you. That is what I get for not clikcing on all the stuff. :)

So, elipses and dashes were simply two possibilities. It could be a factor of word counting headers and footers but these not being included in your copied text. A discrepancy that large is very likely to be due to formatting of some sort, or words that did not get copied or pasted properly.

Did you scramble the novel before putting it into the validator? Is there a limit to how much text can be copied on a mac (I am showing my lack of knowledge about macs here). Perhaps you should save the word document as a text file, then copy the contents of the text file, which will remove fancy formatting such as headers/footers, fonts, etc. and make them all be straight text (on windows at least, exporting the text file includes text from headers and footers, etc.).

It could, of course, be a bug, either in the official validator or in the MS Word for Mac counter; we've already seen posts about a bug in word counting for OpenOffice (I think it was OO) where quoted dialogue got counted wrong, resulting in a large counting difference.

Validator: 31387
OpenOffice: 32390

There's something wrong here. I didn't use all that many dashes or something, so it seems rather unlikely that the difference would be so high. Another word processor gives me the total of 31442.

Did you check out this OpenOffice bug to see if it might be at least part of your issue?

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=89042

What was your alternate word processor?

That one doesn't seem to be a part of the issue I've been experiencing. However, the problem seems to exist solely in OpenOffice so perhaps it's related to this after all.

The alternate one I used just now was Atlantis. Meanwhile, I've downloaded and installed Q10. This programme is consistent with the NaNo-validator and so I'll be using that from now on. Problem solved, for me!

That bug report mentions single quotes in its example, but affects custom double quotes too, which are on by default in OOO3. For that significant of a difference, I'm betting that's the problem.

Go to Tools > AutoCorrect... > Custom Quotes. Make sure both of the "Replace" boxes are not checked. This will prevent further custom quotes from being used. If one is checked, it was likely your problem. Custom double quotes are on by default.

Now, find a line you used quotation marks on in your novel. Copy just the leftmost quotation mark. Go to Edit > Find and Replace, and paste it into the first box, then type a normal quotation mark into the second box, and "Replace All." Go back and copy the rightmost quote from that line, and replace it with a normal quote too. Now run the word count and see what you get.

Specifically, the leftmost custom quotation mark is counting as a word of its own.

I am coming up as being over 400 words shorter than I expected.

I am using open office, but have gone back and specifically checked my word count on quotes and as far as I can see it is not adding extra words, any ideas?

I am behind as it is, I really don't want to find I now need to write another 450 words on top of that :(

EDIT: Just checked again, sorry it is the quotation marks. This is really depressing

Ok, so I decided to use the WC Validator out of curiosity, and here's what happened.

Open Office 2.4.1 (I don't know what that means...) WC: 28,635
NaNoWriMo WC Validator: 28,753

Not that I'm not thrilled to get more words, but I'm sort of worried that I'll write 50k in OO and then it won't look right in the WCV. I use dashes and ...s with spaces after them. OO counts them as two words with or without the space. Is there some discrepancy with that? Also, I read about the Custom Quotes, and now have them unselected. What am I doing wrong?

Do you separate sections of chapters with strings of asterisks or other characters? Some word counters will not count these as words, but I believe the NaNo counter will. There's a number of things that can cause these discrepancies, though.

I would suggest that you check your word count several times over the next few days just to see if your discrepancy changes drastically or not.

Thank you so much, this fixed my problem! I could not for the life of me figure out why my OpenOffice was giving me a 600+ higher word count than NaNo's Word Counter was. I did this and now they're both approximately the same. Not exact, but it's not a 600-word difference either, and I can live with it.

On a slightly more positive note, I technically didn't lose any words. I never had that many to begin with. XD

It's precisely because of formatting issues cropping up that I always type my novel in a plain vanilla little text editor. (Usually Windows' Notepad, but I'm on Linux this year so it's gedit).

...anyone have any thoughts on why my plain vanilla text has a THOUSAND word discrepancy between gedit and NaNo? And not in my favor. I really don't think I used that many quotes, and I space between my hyphens, nothing that's been mentioned so far should be responsible. I knew this would happen, so I let a nice big buffer accumulate, didn't put me that far behind. I'm just nosy about what it could possibly be.