Word count way off

[Mediocrates]

why is the word counter on the site about 40% different from the word count for the same text block in MS word. If I have a 7500 character block in word it's about 11750 characters on the site. and the 7500 characters is including spaces.

[I am David]

What word count :eek:

[Mediocrates]

If you attempt to post something over 10000 characters it will tell you, the problem is that when I count on MS Word I'm well below that and when it gets pasted here the count is much higher.

[Luke90]

I'd guess it counts hidden characters that it puts in as part of the formatting, but 40% seems like a huge difference.