You paste the same text into two different word counters and get different results. It happens more often than you'd expect. Here's why — and how to know which count to trust. The core problem: what is a "word"? Every word counter has to answer this question, and there's no single right answer. The most common approach is whitespace splitting : split the text on any space or line break, count the chunks. In JavaScript: const wordCount = text . trim (). spli...