Doug Robbins wrote:

...I guess all you can do is add some allowance for punctuation on top of
the 4000.

Doug, I've been playing around with the whole word count utility. I hadn't
previously realised that it counts any item which is preceded and succeeded
by spaces as a word: so, for example, "one - two - three" is reported as
five words, which it patently is not.

Short of a macro which first counts everything which Word regards as words
then tallies up all the included non-words and subtracts them from the
count, do you know of any way to obtain a genuine word-count?

Bert
www.bertcoules.co.uk