texcount

Counts words in a Latex file. That is: Latex commands are ignored.

Example:

Prompt> texcount -sum myfile.tex

FILE: myfile.tex
Sum count: 2373
Words in text: 2261
Words in headers: 97
Words in float captions: 4
Number of headers: 25
Number of floats: 0
Number of math inlines: 11
Number of math displayed: 0

To check what it is doing:

Prompt> texcount -v -sum myfile.tex