Are you familiar with Perl hashes?

getting there

That can be applied to a wordcount by just incrementing the value keyed by each word you see

I planned on needing to use a hash here, but it was the creation and filling of that hash that had me stuck...actually it was just the filling of it, they're pretty easy to create :)

Your split doesn't do exactly what you want

ah...good suggestions, I'll go try them out

Check out the length function.

I did earlier in my attempts, but I didn't get very usable results. It told me every word was 1 byte long regardless of actual length. Probably not using it right.

What is unexpected about the behavior of apostrophes?

well, I consider a word like dog's, or cat's a 4 letter word, but my script doesn't seem to.