ok, think that I understand.  my statement will be

SELECT WRD.[value] AS WORD, COUNT(*) AS WCNT
FROM SAMPLE_DATA
CROSS APPLY string_split(SAMPLE_DATA.COL01,CHAR(32)) WRD
GROUP BY WRD.[value]
ORDER BY WCNT...

that seems elegant.  but I'm confused about this part

;WITH SAMPLE_DATA(COL01) AS
(
SELECT 'The brown cat jumped over the fence' UNION ALL
...

OK, thanks for everyone's input.  I am prototyping the workflow of this project, not necessarily prototyping code.   While this may seem slow, it's alleviating a worker the added responsibility to...

that was perfect.  In access, the syntax is different but I got the idea and ported it.  This is processing 90k descriptions against 12k mfgs and completes the query in...

This is the best I can do right now even though your guide says not to do it this way.  CompanyName in table1 does not allow duplicates.

table1

2 tables

I need to inspect each table2.Description field to see if any value contains any of the values that are present in table1.CompanyName.

table2.description
blah blah blah...