Word count differences between Scrivener 2 and Scrivener 3?

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Hi all,

New user to the forum here. :slight_smile: My name is Angela Korra’ti, and I’ve been using Scrivener 2 for a while for several projects. When Scrivener 3 dropped I leapt on it excitedly and so far am enjoying getting to know it.

I have however noticed a discrepancy in my word count calculations. I’ve been browsing other forum posts tonight and others seem to have reported issues with the Writing History feature not being consistent, which is throwing off word counting for some in Nanowrimo efforts. I am also doing Nanowrimo but the discrepancy I’m noting is just on general word counts.

My current active project was one I ported over from Scrivener 2. In addition to working in Scrivener, I also keep a spreadsheet to track my word count progress. But I have noted now that Scrivener 3’s word count numbers–for parts of the book that were already done in this draft and have NOT been changed since i brought the project over–are off.

As near as I can tell, this appears to be because of instances where I use hyphens to join words. For example, “tailor-made”. Scrivener 2 apparently counted this as two words, and Scrivener 3 is counting it as one word.

Can anyone else repro this behavior?

Also, is this actually expected behavior in Scrivener 3? If so that’s fine, I just want to know what to expect so that I can adjust my word count expectations accordingly. (And it does actually seem like this is better behavior–another example in my project I’ve found is the use of spelling out the number 99, “ninety-nine”, which Scrivener 3 is correctly identifying as one word.)

Thanks much for all the hard work on the program!

Angela

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:smiley: :smiley: :smiley: YES!!! This is wonderful, I’ve long wanted Scrivener to treat manually hyphenated words as singular. In science we often have very hard word limits, and most journals (and Microsoft Word, which most people sadly still use), treat manually hyphenated words as singular. This has now aligned Scrivener closer to how both LibreOffice & Microsoft Word do their counting, and closer to how all my collaborators and academic journals count words…

As an aside, an emdash still creates two words, so Pinna–Brelstaff = 2 but Pinna-Brelstaff = 1 — this is probably also fair considering hyphenation rules for using emdash (and also is how Word counts)…

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Yes, this is intended behaviour. This has long been a complaint of many users with how the word count worked, and for Scrivener 3 I was able to find a solution and count hyphenated words as one.

All the best,
Keith

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Keith, thanks much for verifying! I mostly cared about the word count discrepancy for Nanowrimo purposes, but now it’s December, so I care about that less. ;D (Though it was amusing to see that Scrivener 3 thought my manuscript had 198 fewer words in it than Scrivener 2 did!)