The example given was for a search on [belgian waffle recipe] which is interestingly part of the new Google recipe view. Here is a screen shot of the word count showing near the search result ...

Does the length of your content factor into your SEO? How concerned do you need to be with word count? Learn the answers to these and more.

Yet, Google’s John Mueller has debunked the idea that word count matters. Analyzing Word Counts for SEO John Mueller tweeted that matching the word count of top ranked sites will not help a page ...

Docs is a great word processor overall, and it's an even better one now that Google has just added a live word count.

Learn how to quickly get a word count from the top of the document to the cursor position in Pages.

Using the aforementioned Word Count example, you'd click Tools, then scroll down in the Commands box until you found ToolsWordCount. Click to select it, then press the desired keyboard shortcut ...

TextEdit Word Count 2832 words. (15060 characters.) The OK button dismisses the dialog box. As the Hints commenters point out, there are some other ways to do much the same thing.