[ThomasQue]

I was wondering what a word (in a word count) was, thinking like you that "foo -- bar" was only two words, just like "foo-bar" or "foo/bar". So I started two widely used word processors and got surprising results : "foo -- bar" is actually considered 3 words long in both Microsoft Word 2007 and LibreOffice Writer 3.6.1.2, but "foo-bar" and "foo/bar" are 1 word long. There seems to be no standard as to what a word is in this context :

      Different word counting programs may give varying results, 
      depending on the definition of "word", on the text segmentation
      algorithms, and on whether words outside the main text such as
      footnotes or hidden text are counted. [1]

Anyway it seems a consensus to say that "foo -- bar" is 3 words long, so wordcount.is does give a not so wrong answer after all.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_count