Quick Answer
The popular rule says 1,000 tokens is about 750 words. We wanted a measured number, so we ran OpenAI's o200k_base tokenizer over our own published articles. Plain English prose came to 1,348 tokens per 1,000 words, which matches the rule closely. Articles packed with figures, like our page-count guides, came to 1,483.
Tokens for Common Word Counts
| Words | GPT tokens (o200k) | Claude tokens (estimate) |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | 135 | 155 to 182 |
| 250 | 337 | 388 to 455 |
| 500 | 674 | 775 to 910 |
| 750 | 1,011 | 1,163 to 1,365 |
| 1,000 | 1,348 | 1,550 to 1,820 |
| 1,500 | 2,022 | 2,325 to 2,730 |
| 2,000 | 2,696 | 3,100 to 3,640 |
| 5,000 | 6,740 | 7,751 to 9,099 |
| 10,000 | 13,480 | 15,502 to 18,198 |
Claude figures are a range because Anthropic does not publish Claude's tokenizer. OpenAI-style tokenizers undercount Claude, so the range runs from 1.15 to 1.35 times the GPT count. Use Anthropic's token counting API when you need the exact figure.
Language Changes the Count
Tokenizers are trained mostly on English, so other languages split into more pieces. We measured the same three articles in eight languages. These articles contain many numbers, so every row sits above the plain-prose figure, but the differences between languages are what matter:
| Language | Tokens per 1,000 words | vs. English |
|---|---|---|
| English | 1,508 | baseline |
| French | 1,547 | +3% |
| Spanish | 1,563 | +4% |
| Portuguese | 1,571 | +4% |
| Indonesian | 1,905 | +26% |
| Arabic | 2,000 | +33% |
| Turkish | 2,146 | +42% |
| Polish | 2,316 | +54% |
Spanish, French, and Portuguese cost only a few percent more than English. Turkish and Polish, with long words built from many suffixes and endings, cost 40 to 55% more. If you pay per token or work close to a context limit in these languages, budget for it.
How We Measured
- Tokenizer: OpenAI's o200k_base encoding, run with the open-source gpt-tokenizer package.
- Text: the body of our live articles, with navigation, scripts, and tables removed. Prose figures come from seven essay-style articles totaling 8,418 words.
- Words: counted by splitting on whitespace, the same way most word counters work.
- Date: September 2026. Tokenizers change between model generations, so newer models may count differently.
Related Conversions
Going the other way? See how many words fit in 1,000 tokens. To check a real prompt, paste it into the Token Counter, and use the Word Counter for the word side.