The irony is that his title is correct - Boring problems need attention.
But the content is jarringly wrong - The lack of attention didn't lie with the engineers of these companies, but with the author themselves.
For ~1600 words, they could have very easily tried to count it and quickly realized that the answers they got weren't wrong - the question was lazy and lacking attention.
Do you mean dictionary words?
Compound words?
Whitespace separated tokens?
What about stand alone text that isn't a word (ex - page numbers? Title numbers?)
Words that the author invented?
Words use non-traditional-spacing or grammar?(and maybe a missing space)
----
But nope, it's those damn lazy engineers!
i think 3 words. The tiger lily is a type of lily. plural is tiger lillies. Fair to say hypen is stylistic (& after a quick web search , I can't find any other usage like that).
That aside, I can't believe how simplistic Google Docs word recognition/count engine is.
"ago--never": G docs 1 word vs OpenOffice 2 words.
"tiger-lillies--what": G docs 1 word vs OpenOffice 2 words (IDK what this should "really" be)
"Wanting?--Water": GD 3 words vs OO 2 words
In this case the disagreement springs, exclusively, from if the docs engine believes that double hyphens make a compound word (and potentially handling punctuation in the middle of such a compound word)