Interesting. Have you tried sorting the rows? I don't know whether that would take longer or not. If you can sort the data, then afterward you can change the countif to something like this in column B:

If I haven't bobbled the syntax, that'll list the word count for each word in the last row (rather than every row) where the word appears—and I expect it'll work a lot faster than a COUNTIF.

This didn't work for me.

I do have the column sorted A-Z so that all like values are together (column A). I would like for Column B to tell me how many times the corresponding word in column A appears.

so my column A looks like:

alphabet
alphabet
alphabet
banana
banjo
banjo
crayon
crayon
crayon
crayon

I would like my column B to look like:

3
3
3
1
2
2
4
4
4
4

I also could work with a response like this:

alphabet 3
banana 1
banjo 2
crayon 4


I don't mind if it tells me each time the word appears, or only once per word, but since there are so many words, I cannot do an individual count.

I hope this makes it a bit clearer.