Paste the same paragraph into two different word counters and you can sometimes get two different numbers. That's not a bug — it's because "word" isn't as precisely defined as it seems, and different tools make different judgment calls about edge cases. Here's what's actually being decided under the hood.
Most word counters, including Draft Counter, use the simplest and most common approach: split the text everywhere there's a space (or line break), and count each resulting chunk as one word. This is fast, predictable, and matches how most people intuitively think about "a word" — but it means the tool doesn't understand grammar, it's just counting whitespace-separated chunks.
"Well-known," "twenty-one," and "mother-in-law" contain no spaces, so a whitespace-splitting counter treats each as a single word — which matches how most style guides and word processors also count them. Some more linguistically strict tools split on hyphens too, which would count "well-known" as two words instead of one. There's no universally "correct" answer here; it depends on the tool's design choice.
"2024" and "$500" are typically counted as one word each by a whitespace-splitting tool, the same as any other space-separated chunk — even though they're not "words" in the traditional sense. Nearly every practical word counter treats numerals this way, since excluding them would require the tool to distinguish numbers from words, adding complexity for little real benefit.
"Don't," "it's," and "we'll" are each counted as a single word by whitespace-splitting tools, since the apostrophe doesn't create a space. This matches standard usage — nobody expects "don't" to count as two words toward an essay minimum.
A sentence like "the plan—ambitious, risky, exciting—was approved" can behave differently depending on whether the em dash has spaces around it in your original text. If there's no space on either side of the dash, the words touching it may merge into one long "word" by a strict whitespace splitter. This is a genuine edge case where formatting choices (spaced vs. unspaced em dashes) can quietly affect your count.
Beyond the hyphen and dash edge cases above, small differences can come from how a tool handles trailing whitespace, multiple consecutive spaces, line breaks versus paragraph breaks, and whether standalone punctuation marks get filtered out before counting. For ordinary prose without unusual formatting, these differences are typically negligible — a handful of words at most across a full document.