Identical text, different word counts after conversion from WP to

[S3]

Hi,
I'm editing book chapters, and need to be sure of the word counts to meet
the publisher's requirements. When I ran the word count function in WP, I
got one number (included footnotes). When I converted the text to Word 2003
(on Windows XP Professional), I got a much lower number (also included
footnotes). For example, a 7,000-word document in WP becomes a 5,000-word
document in Word 2003. I've carefully ensured that I'm checking the text and
footnotes in each version, so I'm comparing apples and apples.

Why is this happening?

Most importantly, which word count is correct?

Thanks! S3