I saw an older question that suggested the word count was broken in some versions. Is this still a problem? My LibreOffice suggests there are 0 words in my document. I can highlight sections and then get the word count of the text but it used to be easier.
I was going to ask the same question and found yours. Then I just checked something, and was surprised to see the word count work. Puzzled, I checked further and I realized that the word count is OK when opening a .odt, but broken when opening a .doc. I just checked by saving a doc as an odt, and got my counts back.
I’m in 5.1.5.2, not 5.1.4.2, by the way. Dunno if it makes a difference.