While I'm not sure when others would use this I wanted to find the Nth word of a text file so I used this to find the, say, 318th word of the document:

user$ tr -cs "a-zA-Z'" '\012' < document.txt | sed -n '318{p;q;}'

Yes, it can get tripped up by non-Latin characters, hyphenated words, or other edge-cases, but for my 7-bit ASCII input text, it did the job.