Consider this sentence:

I will have been partying for a while to the beat of of African dance music
hits when your plane will have landed in the land of the of the midnight sun.

I know, it is twisted and ugly, but the point is, how many verbs are there?
There are two, but there are 7 words for those two verbs.
And what about "dance," "hits," "land"... in other sentences they might be
verbs...

How do you excpect a program to give you the correct total without human
intervention?

You would need a very complicated algorithm, and even then, the results
would never be really trustworthy.

That being said (or written!), with some creativity and lots of time to test
various sample texts, you might be able to do somthing using the synonym
list, which does have a "part of speech" element.

Here is some code directly from the VBA on-line help.
It lists all the main meanings (synonyms) associatd with a word and their
part of speech. If one of them is a verb, the source word might be a verb. If
all of them are verbs, the source word is most likely a verb, if none of them
are verbs, the source word is most likely not a verb. Notice that I am not
using absolutes because as soon as you handle English semantics and grammar,
there are no absolute.

Note that you would have to modify the code to scan each word in a
selection...
And find a way to flag those that might be verbs (Highlighting?)

Sub FindVerb()

Set mySynInfo = Selection.Range.SynonymInfo
If mySynInfo.MeaningCount <> 0 Then
   myList = mySynInfo.MeaningList
   myPos = mySynInfo.PartOfSpeechList
   For i = 1 To UBound(myPos)
       Select Case myPos(i)
           Case wdAdjective
                pos = "adjective"
           Case wdNoun
                pos = "noun"
           Case wdAdverb
                pos = "adverb"
           Case wdVerb
                pos = "verb"
           Case Else
                pos = "other"
       End Select
       MsgBox myList(i) & " found as " & pos
   Next i
Else
   MsgBox "There were no meanings found."
End If

End Sub

If you select "partying" in my ugly sentence above and run the code, you get
one meaning and it is a noun. If you select "landed", you get 0 meanings.

So, even this code cannot identify the two verbs in the sentence...

If you add code to strip "ing" or "ed" from words when scanning hem, then
"land" above (still in my ugly sentence) returns 2 noun meanings, 3 verbs and
one adjective... So, which is it? Would you trust the code to make a
decision? Based on which argumnents would the code make a decision? Also,
stripping "ing" or "ed" is not enough, consider "running" > "runn", "placed"

And, what about irregular verbs? put (no "ed"), found, bound. laid, sang, etc.

Good luck!

This is more of a question of grammar than Word.

 Hello

 Is there any way to make word count the number of verbs in a document or highlighted portion?

 thanks
 --
 **********
 Rafael T