Check out the attached example. It uses regular expressions, so some caveats:
1. My regex skills stink, so it may not count words as perfectly as you like. It's pretty tolerant of special characters but a string like "this & that" will count as 3 words, since the & is counted as a word. You can tweak the regular expression to adjust to your needs.
2. Since this uses javascript regular expressions, it will work fine in Reader and Acrobat but I don't think it will work for forms rendered on the Livecycle server (such as in Output). For some reason regex support is missing in the Livecycle server javascript engine; or if it is there it doesn't work on my server.
The script is in the exit: event of the data entry text box. You can type in (or paste) text into that text box and when you tab out of the box the word count will update. You can move the script into a different event on your form depending on when you need the words counted.
Let me know how this works out for you.
