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I read this in a product review, and it has been bugging me all day.

Three words: it's really cheap.

"It's" is obviously a contraction of two words, but does it count as one or two words?

Kjensen
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  • Pick a definition of word (or look up "it's" in a dictionary). If it's a word then 1, if not then 2. – Mitch Sep 04 '12 at 17:56
  • I'd count "it's" as one word. It may be a contraction of two, but that contraction still forms a single word. According to NOAD's definition of a word, "it's" would pass the single-word test. – J.R. Sep 04 '12 at 18:11
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    If you're counting words in something you've written and you get paid by the word, it's two. Otherwise, it's one. – Jay Sep 04 '12 at 19:03
  • +1 that would bug me all day too. It IS going to bug me all day. – JAM Sep 04 '12 at 19:08
  • @Jay Although your comment is amusing, I feel compelled to point out that it is not actually correct. – tchrist Sep 05 '12 at 16:05
  • @tchrist Hmm. Perhaps I need to explain that "to get to the other side" is not an adequate explanation of why the chicken crossed the road, because it fails to explain why the chicken wanted to get to the other side. That's why we call it a "joke". Like my comment. :-) – Jay Sep 05 '12 at 17:35

3 Answers3

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MS Word and the concordoncer I’m using count them as one. Some dictionaries may count them as two. It all depends on what your purpose is in counting.

Barrie England
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  • Barrie, what is a "concordoncer"? I looked it up in two online dictionaries and on Google and could not find an obvious definition. – JAM Sep 05 '12 at 16:07
  • @JAM http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/ What else is Google for, ha! – Kris Sep 07 '12 at 06:39
  • @JAM: It's software that allows an electronically stored corpus to be interrogated for lexical and grammatical features. – Barrie England Sep 07 '12 at 06:45
  • "MS Word counts them as one" is a pretty weak argument, in my opinion. The English language and its grammar were evolved by humans for humans, and MS Word does its best to keep up, but it's certainly not an expert. – Stef Mar 16 '22 at 17:33
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According to your question, "It's" is obviously a contraction of two words

... into one, right?

Where's the doubt, then?

In the given context, it is beyond question that "It's" is one word.

In a different context where you may be concerned with serious lexical parsing, you may need to treat it as two words, though.

Kris
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    I have indeed seen lexical analysers that have an apostrophe-s token. – tchrist Sep 05 '12 at 17:44
  • It could be a contraction of two words, as in, another way of showing two words that are still two words. But the "into one" part doesn't have to be a part of the definition of a contraction, the way it has to be a part of the definition of "compound word." – Daniel Mar 04 '15 at 03:33
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If it has spaces or other punctuation around it, it is one word, just as hyphenated words and compound words are. Each of these list items is a single word:

  • won’t, he’ll, oughtn’t, ’tisn’t, I’d’ve, couldn’t’ve, o’rreaching, mine’ll, ain’t, durstn’t
  • big-hearted, teeter-totter, to-morrow, now-a-days, snarf-n-barf, wine-colored, re-elect, vis-à-vis, tête-à-tête, air-cushioned, arch-enemy, salpingo-oöphorectomy
  • cannot, tomorrow, yesterday, nowadays, windshield, Christmas, Halloween, Michaelmas, elsewhither, grandmother, crosswalk, corkscrew, overdiversified, overreaching, breastfeed
tchrist
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