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Here is an interesting discovery. Copy the following text into a buffer:

'hello world'
'नमस्कार नमस्कार'

One can see that there are four words, two on line 1 and two on line 2.

Emacs count these as six words! Two on line 1 and four on line 2!

In case if it matters, I am using Doom Emacs v 2.0.9, Emacs v 26.3.

How do I set things right?

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    Can't reproduce with GNU Emacs 26.3 (build 1, i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.14.5) of 2019-09-04. count-words-region tells: The region has 4 words. – Andreas Röhler Jan 17 '20 at 9:55
  • @AndreasRöhler see answer of devcom – jue Jan 17 '20 at 11:35
  • @jue Checked with org- and text-mode: always 4 words with GNU Emacs 28.0.50 (build 1, i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.14.5) of 2020-01-10. BTW maybe the single-quotes produce some single-word count in certain environments? – Andreas Röhler Jan 18 '20 at 15:06
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The problem is with the second line which Emacs sometimes treats as four words. I can reproduce this in Vanilla Emacs 26.3 and 28.1. If I copy your text into the Emacs scratch buffer or into a .el file I get the correct count. If I copy the text into an org file or text file, the count is incorrect. This persuades me that this is likely a bug which has to do with the way Emacs treats the Hindi script, in which case I would file a bug report. First I would check my dot Emacs for language specific and environment settings and remove any you have specifically added.

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  • I can reproduce this with Emacs v25.1. – jue Jan 17 '20 at 11:35
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    M-x report-emacs-bug – Drew Jan 17 '20 at 17:04

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