Count words in a document

Goal: Get a total word count for a Markdown file, e.g. to estimate reading time for a blog post.

Prerequisites: -A, since the total is a sum across every node.

Query

$ mq -A 'nodes
| map(fn(n): to_text(n) | split(" ") | len;)
| fold(0, fn(acc, x): acc + x;)' post.md

Input

# Title

This is a short paragraph with some words in it.

## Section

Another paragraph here, with more words to count for the estimate.

Output

23

Notes

• Gotcha: calling to_text(self) directly on the whole -A array (instead of per-node inside map) does not give clean plain text — it keeps heading markers like #/## and joins nodes with commas. Convert each node to text individually with to_text(n) inside map, then sum the per-node word counts, as above.
• This is a rough count (splitting on single spaces), not a linguistically precise word count — good enough for a reading-time estimate, not for billing by the word.