In computer terms, 1 word is 4 bytes. 1,073,741,824/4= 268,435,456. In more familiar terms, in average English text, there are about 4.5 letters per word. Add the space after the word, and it will be about 5. So the answer is about 200 million words per gigabyte. That is based on a file with simple, plain text. Most word processor files add a lot of extra stuff for formatting, fonts, margins, and so on, so it is hard to give a more accurate answer.
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In Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and above: 1000000000
In Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and below: 1073741824