You don’t need jQuery for this. It would be way overkill.
// get the text you want to count
var txt = "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog";
// a regex that matches individual words
var word = /\b\w+\b/g;
// this is a counter, 0 words to start
c = 0;
// loop: increment counter as long as you keep finding words
while( r = word.exec( txt ) ){ c += 1; }
// see how many words you found
alert( c );
pen
@jamy just saw your response – problem is, what happens when you have multiple spaces between words?
