#include<stdio.h>
#include<string.h>

const int MAX_WORDS = 10;
const int WORD_LENGTH = 15;

//typedef here can't take variables, even const, why?
typedef char word_array[10][15];

int read_words(FILE *f, int words_count, word_array words)
{
    int word;
    for (word=0; word<words_count; word++)
    {
        fscanf(f, "%s", &words[word]);
    }
    return 0;
}

int main()
{
    // read input data
    int i,d,p,r;
    FILE *fi, *fo;
    fi = fopen("sentence_input.txt", "r");

    word_array sentence1;

    fscanf(fi, "%d", &i);
    read_words(fi, i, &sentence1);

    // just printing to make sure it works
    for (int word=0; word<i; word++)
    {
      printf("%s => ", sentence1[word]);
      printf("%d\n", strlen(sentence1[word]));
    }
    fclose(fi);
}

$ make sentence
cc     sentence.c   -o sentence
sentence.c: In function ‘read_words’:
sentence.c:14:19: warning: format ‘%s’ expects argument of type ‘char *’, but argument 3 has type ‘char (*)[15]’ [-Wformat=]
         fscanf(f, "%s", &words[word]);
                   ^
sentence.c: In function ‘main’:
sentence.c:29:23: warning: passing argument 3 of ‘read_words’ from incompatible pointer type [-Wincompatible-pointer-types]
     read_words(fi, i, &nouns);
                       ^
sentence.c:9:5: note: expected ‘char (*)[15]’ but argument is of type ‘char (*)[10][15]’
 int read_words(FILE *f, int words_count, word_array words)
     ^
sentence.c:33:14: warning: format ‘%d’ expects argument of type ‘int’, but argument 2 has type ‘size_t {aka long unsigned int}’ [-Wformat=]
       printf("%d\n", strlen(nouns[word]));
              ^