For a long time, there has been a known issue with Moodle's ability to count words: MDL-46256. That got fixed this week.
However, we then almost immediately found some more cases where Moodle gets it 'wrong'.
One might it was open to debate what the 'right' word-count is for some tricky texts (with lots of punctuation, etc.). However, it seems that all of
- Microsoft Word
- LibreOffice
- Some random web-site I found on Google (https://wordcounter.net/)
- And a custom atto plugin we use at the Open University
all give the same answer for all the examples I tried, and Moodle build in word-count gives a different answer. Therefore, I think we have to say that Moodle 'wrong' and should be brought into line.
I hope everyone agrees that is a good thing to do. I have created MDL-70796 to do it.