The standard Emacs distribution contains functions for counting the number of lines and words within a region.
Certain types of writing ask you to count words. Thus, if you write
an essay, you may be limited to 800 words; if you write a novel, you
may discipline yourself to write 1000 words a day. It seems odd, but
for a long time, Emacs lacked a word count command. Perhaps people used
Emacs mostly for code or types of documentation that did not require
word counts; or perhaps they restricted themselves to the operating
system word count command, wc. Alternatively, people may have
followed the publishers’ convention and computed a word count by
dividing the number of characters in a document by five.
There are many ways to implement a command to count words. Here are
some examples, which you may wish to compare with the standard Emacs
command, count-words-region.