How Many Words? Typical Lengths for Essays, Articles, Descriptions and More

If someone has given you a limit, that limit wins, every time. When nobody has, the ranges below are what readers and editors in English-speaking schools, workplaces and publications commonly expect: roughly 250 to 400 words for a cover letter, 600 to 2,000 for a blog post, 150 to 250 for an academic abstract, and 50 to 300 for a product description. For short text fields, the limits are counted in characters, and those come from how screens and phone networks truncate text.

Everything here is a convention, not a law. Use the numbers to sanity-check a draft, not as targets to pad toward: a 700-word answer to a 400-word question is usually too long, but a 300-word one that covers everything is fine.

Common word ranges by type of writing

Fiction categories are one place where the numbers are formal. Several genre-fiction awards define a short story as under 7,500 words, a novelette as 7,500 to 17,499, a novella as 17,500 to 39,999 and a novel as 40,000 or more. Publishers' expectations for a first novel are usually well above that 40,000 minimum.

Words, pages and characters

Many assignments are still set in pages. With a 12-point font and standard margins, a single-spaced page holds roughly 500 words and a double-spaced page about 250. Font choice, headings and paragraph breaks move that by ten or twenty percent, so a word limit is more precise than a page limit and worth asking for.

For English prose, each word averages a little under five letters, or about six characters once you count the space after it. That gives a quick conversion: a 1,000-character field holds roughly 160 to 180 words, and a 280-character limit about 45 to 50. Technical writing with long terms runs higher per word; casual writing runs lower.

Page titles: about 50 to 60 characters

Search result pages show a page's title as a single clickable line. Because that line has a fixed width on the screen, titles longer than it are cut off with an ellipsis. The cut is made by pixel width, not by character count, so a title full of wide letters like W and M truncates sooner than one full of narrow letters like i and l. In practice, titles of around 50 to 60 characters usually display in full on desktop screens.

Put the words that matter most at the start, so that if the end is cut, the meaning survives. Also keep in mind that search engines sometimes rewrite a title they consider unhelpful, so a clear, accurate title is worth more than one tuned to an exact length.

Meta descriptions: about 150 to 160 characters

The short summary under a search result, often taken from the page's meta description, is also trimmed to fit its space, typically two lines on desktop. That works out at roughly 150 to 160 characters, and fewer on phones. Anything beyond that is simply not shown.

A good description reads as one or two plain sentences that tell a searcher exactly what the page gives them. Search engines may show a different excerpt from the page if they think it matches the query better, so treat the description as your best suggestion rather than a guarantee.

Text messages: 160 or 70 characters

A single SMS can carry 140 bytes of text. Phone networks normally pack messages in the GSM 7-bit default alphabet defined in 3GPP TS 23.038, which fits 160 characters into those 140 bytes. That alphabet covers the basic Latin letters, digits, common punctuation and a set of accented letters, but not everything.

As soon as a message contains a single character outside it, such as an emoji, most characters from non-Latin scripts, or certain typographic symbols, the whole message switches to a 16-bit encoding (UCS-2). Then only 70 16-bit units fit in one message. Most letters take one unit, but most emoji take two (and joined emoji, such as family or flag sequences, take more), so 69 letters plus one emoji already needs a second message. A few symbols, including the euro sign and square and curly brackets, are in the GSM extension table and count as two characters each.

Longer messages are split into parts, and each part gives up a few characters to a header that tells the receiving phone how to reassemble them. That is why a 161-character message counts as two parts, and why one emoji in a 100-character text can turn a single message into two. If you pay per message or send in bulk, check for stray curly quotes pasted from a word processor, which can trigger the switch when a sending system does not convert them.

Why two counters can disagree

Counting words sounds exact, but programs make different choices at the edges, so the same text can give slightly different totals. Most counters treat any run of characters between spaces as one word. That makes a hyphenated term like "well-known" one word, a number like 10,000 one word, and a web address one word however long it is. Words joined by a dash with no spaces around it may be counted as one. Some counters skip stand-alone symbols or numbers; others include them.

The differences are usually a fraction of a percent, but they can matter when you are within a few words of a strict cap. If an institution names the tool or rule it uses, count with that. Otherwise leave yourself a small margin under the limit.

Hitting a word limit well

When you are over

• Cut whole sentences that repeat a point before trimming words inside sentences.
• Replace phrases like "in order to" with "to" and "due to the fact that" with "because".
• Delete hedges ("quite", "very", "somewhat") unless they change the meaning.
• Check whether headings, references or captions count toward the limit; often they do not.

When you are under

• Add an example or a number where you made a general claim.
• Answer the obvious follow-up question a reader would ask.
• Do not pad. Readers notice filler faster than they notice a short answer.

Many limits allow a margin of about ten percent either way, but some are hard cut-offs enforced by a form that will not accept one character more. If in doubt, stay under. For how long your finished piece will take to read, see our guide to how reading time is calculated.