We had a similar question a couple of weeks back. On that ocasion the suplicant had a multi gigabyte file in a static format that they wanted to search quickly.

In your case, the simplest soution to search and count for single words is to use grep. eg:

grep -c 'some_word' /path/to/filename.txt

This approch is simple, and reasonably fast. If you want more speed you would need to construct an index, and the best way to do that would be to use a database. In the thread referenced above, erix documented how to import the data into a PostgreSQL database. It took about several minutes to import and index the data, but once that was done, searches took around a tenth of a millisecond.

If your data is not structured, then you would have more work to import it into a database, but it can still be done.

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