The Complete Word Count Guide

Word count is one of the few writing metrics with direct business consequences. Search engines weight content depth, publishers commission by length, platforms enforce hard limits, and academic institutions assess by it. This guide covers every word-count question we get asked, links to the deeper articles, and points you at the right tool for each task.

Word counts by content type

The fastest way to use this guide: find the row that matches what you're writing.

Page ↔ word conversions

Pages and words trade off cleanly once you fix the font and spacing. The most common configuration — 12pt Times New Roman, 1-inch margins, US Letter — gives roughly:

• Single-spaced: 500 words per page
• 1.5 spacing: 333 words per page
• Double-spaced: 250 words per page

Use the Words to Pages converter for any combination of font, size, and spacing. Use Pages to Words if you have a page count and need the word target.

Reading and speaking time

Time is downstream of word count: at 250 WPM for silent reading and 130 WPM for speaking, every word maps to ~0.24 seconds of reading or ~0.46 seconds of speech.

• Reading time calculator — paste any text, see live reading and speaking estimates
• Words to minutes calculator — convert any word count to speech time at any pace

How word counters count words

Different tools give slightly different counts because they tokenize differently. The convention used by Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and our Word Counter:

• Tokens are separated by any whitespace.
• Numbers count as words ("3 apples" = 2 words).
• Hyphenated compounds count as one word ("well-known" = 1).
• Contractions count as one word ("don't" = 1).
• URLs and emails count as one word each.
• Punctuation never counts.