diff --git a/spacy/tests/test_language.py b/spacy/tests/test_language.py
index 86cce5f9e..72d1597fd 100644
--- a/spacy/tests/test_language.py
+++ b/spacy/tests/test_language.py
@@ -419,6 +419,23 @@ def test_language_from_config_before_after_init_invalid():
             English.from_config(config)
 
 
+def test_language_whitespace_tokenizer():
+    """Test the custom whitespace tokenizer from the docs."""
+
+    class WhitespaceTokenizer:
+        def __init__(self, vocab):
+            self.vocab = vocab
+
+        def __call__(self, text):
+            words = text.split()
+            return Doc(self.vocab, words=words)
+
+    nlp = spacy.blank("en")
+    nlp.tokenizer = WhitespaceTokenizer(nlp.vocab)
+    doc = nlp("What's happened to    me? he thought. It wasn't a dream. ")
+    assert doc
+
+
 def test_language_custom_tokenizer():
     """Test that a fully custom tokenizer can be plugged in via the registry."""
     name = "test_language_custom_tokenizer"
diff --git a/website/docs/usage/linguistic-features.md b/website/docs/usage/linguistic-features.md
index 5a1293c2e..7dc6cff25 100644
--- a/website/docs/usage/linguistic-features.md
+++ b/website/docs/usage/linguistic-features.md
@@ -1168,7 +1168,7 @@ class WhitespaceTokenizer:
         self.vocab = vocab
 
     def __call__(self, text):
-        words = text.split(" ")
+        words = text.split()
         return Doc(self.vocab, words=words)
 
 nlp = spacy.blank("en")