The Strange Case of Google Docs and the Counting of Words

I found out recently that not all text processing applications count words in the same way, and it's sort of freaked me out.

In the past, I’ve always done my writing in Microsoft Word. This goes all the way back to Word 6.0 on my Mac LC when I was at University thirty years ago. I pay for Microsoft 365, which not only includes Office (and so Word) but also comes with 1TB of clo...