I added an additional feature to truncate partial words that may be cut off when you trim the title by modifying the first if statement.

if ( $length && is_numeric($length) && strlen($title) >= $length) {
$title = substr( $title, 0, $length ); // Trim title to 40 characters
$lastSpace = strrpos($title, ‘ ‘); // Locate the last space in the title
$title = substr($title, 0, $lastSpace); // Trim the portion of the last word off
}