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How many characters are in a word?
An average English word has about 4.7 letters; with the space after it and the odd comma or full stop, it takes about 6 characters. So 280 characters, the length of an X post, holds about 43 to 50 words.
Work it out
pages, single-spaced, Arial 12 pt, about 500 words a page
- Handwritten pages
- 0.2
- Reading time
- 12 sec
- Speaking time
- 19 sec–22 sec
- Typing time
- 1 min 11 sec
- Paragraphs
- 1
- Sentences
- 2–3
- Characters with spaces
- about 282
Write it in the word counter with a limit of 280 characters.
Open the word counterWords that fit in a character limit
| Characters | Words that fit |
|---|---|
| 160 | 24–29 |
| 280 | 43–50 |
| 300 | 46–54 |
| 500 | 76–90 |
| 1,000 | 153–181 |
| 2,200 | 338–400 |
| 3,000 | 461–545 |
| 5,000 | 769–909 |
Where 4.7 letters comes from
Counting every word in a large body of English text, rather than every word in the dictionary, gives an average of about 4.7 letters, because the most common words are short: “the”, “of”, “and”, “a”, “to”. A dictionary average is higher, around eight letters, but you do not write in dictionary words. Peter Norvig’s analysis of the Google Books collection, for example, found an average of 4.79 letters per word in running text.
Technical, legal and academic writing uses longer words, often 5.5 letters or more on average, so the same number of characters holds fewer words. Writing with many numbers, names or links behaves differently again.
Converting characters and words
To turn a character limit into words, divide by 6 for a typical estimate, by 6.5 to be safe and by 5.5 for plain, simple text. To go the other way, multiply words by 6. When the limit really matters, such as on an application form or a platform, count the actual characters with the character counter: spaces, punctuation and emoji all count.
Questions and answers
How many words is 280 characters?
About 43 to 50 words of English.
How many characters is 100 words?
About 550 to 650 characters with spaces, typically 600.
Do spaces count as characters?
On almost every platform and form, yes. Some school and translation work counts characters without spaces; the character counter shows both.
How many characters is the average word in other languages?
It differs a lot: German words are longer on average, and Chinese and Japanese use far fewer characters per word, which is why platforms such as X count those characters double.