The behavior you describe is the designed behavior -- not what I wanted either. In the case of a delimited string such as

lcString = "test1|test2||test4"

I would want the third word to be empty; however, GETWORDNUM() returns test4 as the third word and GETWORDNUM() returns 3, instead of 4. If you do a string translation first and insert a space in a null place:

lcString = "test1|test2||test4"
DO WHILE ATC("||", lcString) > 0
   lcString = STRTRAN(lcString, "||", , "| |")
ENDDO
lcThird = GETWORDNUM(lcString, 3, "|")

Now you will get the results that you expect.