When you are given a writing assignment in the college, either a certain number of pages or a particular word count is required. If the assignment is to write a six-page paper on a topic related to the American Revolution, you may wonder how many words are in six pages. The fact is there is no perfect answer to this question.
How many words there are on a page depends on the font type, font size, spacing, margins, and paragraph length. Depending on the assignment, the Professor may require students to divide their papers into sections, with headings and subheadings. That can also affect the number of words per page.
General Requirements
For college essays and papers, the typical font types are Times New Roman, Arial, and Verdana. The standard font size requirement is 12pt, and the margin requirements are one-inch on all sides. Also, in college, papers must usually be double-spaced, though some professors demand single-spacing.
There are general guidelines, on how many pages it takes to reach a word count. For example, a 2000-word essay is approximately four pages when single-spaced and eight pages when double spaced. A 60,000 words dissertation written by a Ph.D. candidate is about 120 pages single spaced and 200 pages double spaced. You can use wordcounttool.com to be sure about the number of words present in your work.
Calculating words in a page
Suppose a student is asked to draft an essay with 1,000 words. If the font is 12pt Times New Roman font with double-spacing and one-inch margins, the essay would fit in almost four pages. Similarly, and essay having 1500 would take up three pages when single-spaced but six pages when double-spaced. If the spacing set as 1.5, a 1,500-word essay would end in almost five pages.
How many words do these require?
1. A speech
An average five-minute speech means approximately 750 words in total, 125-150 words in a minute. You should not speak more than 200 words in a minute so that your audience is able to understand clearly what you are saying.
2. For publishing
The way how your work will be printed decides how many words will be there per page. The font and the size of the text affect how many words can fit inside a page. Paperback novels and publishes books fonts like Calibri and Garamond are often used. The commonly used font size in paperback novels ranges from 10pt to 14pt.
Additionally, these factors also determine the number of words per page:
- Presence of charts, graphs, pictures, etc.
- Spacing between paragraphs and lines
- Reading level of the book
- The physical dimension of the book
3. Common novel
In case of manuscripts, there are 250-300 words per page if the spacing is double. With single-spacing, a page can contain up to 500 words.
Although it depends on font type, font size, formatting, and spacing of the text, a novel 80,000 words with 300 words per page will be 267 pages long.
