How do I list word count in multiple files?

Say I need to find out how many words are in each file that has the word 'work' in its name.

I know that to find files with 'work' in the name, it would be ls work. And to figure out the number of words in a file it would be wc -w.

However I tried the following and it seems to be just displaying the number of files, not the number of words combined in all files (which I need):

ls work | wc -w

So say if there are 14 files that have 'work' in the name, it would display 14, not the number of words.

The syntax is wc -w [FILE]. If you don't use FILE but pipe in the output of ls work it will only count what it will read on stdin.

You need to pipe in the text itself:

cat *work* | wc -w

Alternative you could execute wc with find -exec. But be aware that this could show multiple "total" sums as find will call wc multiple times if there are lots of files.

find ./ -type f -name "*work*" -exec wc -w {} +

You can run wc with multiple files and then use shell built-in * which adds every non hidden files in working directory to wc's parameters.

wc -w *work*