word count on record insertion

Hi There, I'm trying to develop a band listing site and was just wondering if there is a php function that could limit the amount of words added into a text area. I'm aware that this can be done in javascript but the only one I found doesn't work properly if you try and paste in text to the text box. This was the script I was looking at: http://javascript.internet.com/forms/word-counter.html I want to have something similar to this but as mentioned above want something more reliable so does anyone know a php function to do this or have a better option?