def load_stopwords(stopword_file):
    """
    Utility function to load stop words from a file and return as a list of
    words.

    Parameters
    ----------
    stopword_file : str
        Path and filename of a file containing stop words.


    Returns
    ------
    stopwords :  list
        A list of stop words.

    """
    stopwords = []
    for line in open(stopword_file):
        if line.strip()[0:1] != '#':
            for word in line.split():
                stopwords.append(word)
    return stopwords
