Different Word counts of the same document

[Helen]

I writing a doctoral thesis and wish to count the words. If I right click on
the file in Windows explorer,select properties and navigate to word count, I
get a different count to when I open the file and select word count from the
tools menu. Which count is correct?

 

[Jezebel]

Depends on how you define 'word'. (In fact there are several other ways to
get word counts for a document, all different.) Does it matter?

 

[Helen]

Yes I would like to know how long the thesis is. The only way I understand
word count is to count the number of words in a text. Eg "the cat sat on the
mat" has 6 words. I would expect that the word count include headings and if
selected footnotes /endnotes.
Can you help find an accurate word count?

 

[Jezebel]

As I said, you need to define 'word' - how do you want to deal with
hypehenations, numbers, codes, chemical formulae, equations, inflected and
punctuated word forms, etc? Do you want to exclude quotations and references
(which you can do by judicious language settings)? "The cat sat on the mat"
is easy, but what about ....

(a) e = mc2 .... [Einstein 1905, p33]

All the methods come up with 'reasonable' numbers (as, for that matter, does
total characters divided by six, assuming you're writing English).