worldcount

Worldcount is a term used to describe the total number of words in a body of text or across a collection of texts. In writing and publishing, it is used as a size metric to gauge length and manage production. In computational linguistics and text analytics, worldcount can refer to the aggregate word count of a corpus, as distinct from the per-document word counts.

Counting methods vary. A simple approach tokenizes on whitespace, counting each sequence of characters separated by spaces as a word. More nuanced implementations apply language-specific rules for contractions, hyphenated compounds, and non-Latin scripts. In corpora, the term "worldcount" (or token count) may include numbers and symbols depending on the counting policy.

Applications include editing, where target word counts guide revisions; estimation of reading time and cost; natural language processing tasks where corpus size correlates with model performance; and search indexing for resource planning.

Limitations: no universal standard defines worldcount. Results depend on tokenization, language, and included categories (e.g., numbers, punctuation).

See also: word count, tokenization, corpus linguistics, text analytics, readability metrics.