Here's your approach for counting words in a file:
Create an ifstream object with the filename.
Check if the file opened successfully; if not, print an error and exit.
Initialize a word counter to zero and a string variable to hold each word.
Use a while loop: while (infile >> word) { count++; }.
After the loop, close the file with infile.close().
Output the final count. The stream handles whitespace splitting and end-of-file detection automatically.