Counting words on the command line

Recently, I have been writing a number of essays with various word limits. So, I have been finding myself in need of doing frequent word counts. Getting a word count for a file is easy using the wc utility.

wc -w /path/to/file

However, sometimes I just write a piece in a browser text box, which don't have word count. So, I want to get a word count from the console rather than saving it to a file and working with it. It turned out to be quite easy actually. I just had to cat the entire text and pipe that to wc.

cat << EOF | wc -w
>Your text here
>
>More here.
>EOF