Microsoft Words counts hyphenated words as one word, which is correct. When I refer to “one man,” I have two words, but when I have a “one-man operation” I don’t have three words, but Scrivener counts it that way. For some strange reason, Scrivener wants to treat a hyphen as a space in counting words. Therefore, we have Scrivener counting re-emphasize as two words, which is obviously incorrect. Recently, I had a Word document with 1712 words, but Scrivener counted it as 1732, only because of the 20 hyphenated words. I would love to see this fixed someday.
Thanks, this has been fixed and will be available in the next update.
Thanks. Now fixed. I ran across another discrepancy:
Example: Proverbs 3:6
Word has it as two words.
Scrivener has it as three.
Thanks Frank Ball, I have update the source code and “3:6” will be treated as one word in the next update too.
On a twist on this topic, when counting “em dashes”, Scrivener counts the two words on either side as one word.
For instance: This—in my opinion—is incorrect. is counted as four words, not six if—as is acceptable usage (see The Punctuation Guide)—they have no spaces around the em dash (it counts six if there are a non-zero number of spaces around the em dash.)
In case you missed it in the example above, this—in my opinion—is incorrect behavior. The correct word count—be it zero or many spaces around an em dash—is six.
I should also add, since I just noticed the age of the original post, that it didn’t used to count like this, only showing this behavior in the last release or so. Is it possible in trying to fix the hyphen issue the em dash problem was introduced?
Thanks, Micah. Em and En Dashes will be treated as word separators in the next update. Scrivener for Mac and Word do the same, so we will follow for consistency.
For a long while, I’ve now seen the Scrivener count exactly match Word. This morning, I had a document where Scrivener said it was 2030 words, and Word said it was 2018. I compared the word count for each paragraph. In every paragraph, the Scrivener count matched Word’s count for the paragraph. The total count for all the paragraphs was correct at 2030. Yet Word was showing 2018, both for the highlighted entire text and what it shows for the document. Obviously, Word has some obscure bug that will never be fixed. It’s not unusual for me to find bugs in Word. I live in hope they will be fixed, but have to fine a workaround because they seldom are ever fixed. How wonderful to have Scrivener, constantly striving to make the product better. Thank you.