That would miss something like...

"Rover (my dog) is my best friend."

The problem in trying to isolate words, as whole words, is being able to
enumerate all of the possible delimiters for them.

Rick


"Teethless mama" wrote in message
...
If that is the case then try this:

=SUM(COUNTIF(A1:A7,{"dog *","* dog *","* dog"}))

"Rick Rothstein (MVP - VB)" wrote:

I need to count the number of times specific words appear in a sheet ,
I'm
not having much luck on my own as the word might be within the cell but
not
constitute the whole contents.

i.e looking for the word DOG in cell containing "the dog sat down"

Just be aware of the "embedded word" problem that exists with the
formulas
that have posted. For example, each of them would count the "d-o-g"
letter
combination inside the word "boondoggle" as a hit for the word "dog".

Rick