That just depends on how a word is defined. Which the OP didn't. And considering the suggestions how to fix the OP's solution (split with no arguments/-a without a -F), I wasn't the only one taking the not uncommon "non-whitespace" definition.

But I'd like to see the version you would write during a job interview. Make sure you take into account punctuation, Unicode and words like O'Reilly, and home-brew.

Abigail