There are many ways to measure your writing, but knowing how many words you’ve written to know how many pages you will end up with is one of the most common.
The average short story is 5,000 to 10,000 words long. This is excellent information, but it doesn’t help if you’re trying to plan out how many pages you need to write a day in order to hit a writing target.
How many pages is 5000 words?
Number of Pages by Word Count
Below are some elements that determine how many pages is 5,000 words:
- Font Size
- Font Selection
- Spacing
- Margins
1. Font Size
The size of the font is the most important aspect on the number of pages. Size 30 font is going to create a much longer piece than size 12.
For this article, let’s assume the font is size 12 because this is the most common size used in professional or creative settings.
2. Font Selection
What font you choose is also essential to the overall page count. Some fonts, by nature, are larger or small than others – they’re designed that way.
For this article, let’s assume you’ve chosen either Times New Roman font or Arial font, two of the most commonly used fonts in Microsoft Word.
3. Spacing
Whether you choose single spacing or double spacing changes everything, the page count will literally double as double spacing is twice as spaced as single spacing.
4. Margins
The most common margins are 1″. Let’s use these margins as anything less would lessen the number of pages, and anything larger would increase the page count.
Typewritten Work
A piece with a 5,000 word count is approximately 10 pages single spaced or 20 pages double spaced.
Double Spaced
As mentioned above, a double-spaced document with a 5,000 word count is expected to have 20 pages. Reading this document takes 17 minutes on average.
Conventionally, 20 pages is reached when using Arial font or Times New Roman 12 pt., with standard margins of 1″.
Most documents with this word count and line spacing are theses, dissertations, journal articles, and comprehensive blogs. The double spacing lets the teachers, panelists, or experts read the documents more easily and creates space for comments to be left.
It is important to note that the number of pages is subject to changes when font style and size, margins, and paragraph spacing are modified.
Handwritten
Writing by hand is an entirely different type of writing than typing. Everything about typing is uniform which provides a consistent page count.
Handwriting is anything but consistent. The same person can write a page, and their personal font will vary throughout the page, including style and size.
Really, it gets rather complicated rather quickly and the word count per page will vary depending on a number of factors. Whether they’re writing on lined paper or blank paper also changes the margins and spacing of the words.
A good estimate, however, is that handwritten pieces are equivalent to double-spaced typed pieces.
Other Ways To Determine How Many Pages Is 5000 Words
There are other ways to determine how long 5,000 words is. The first way is to use the character count on a piece.
However, this method is unreliable because it depends on the number of characters in words, and a slight variation can change the number drastically.
If a 5,000 word count averages five characters per word, then there will be 25,000 characters used. But if we change the average number of characters to seven, then the overall number of characters is 35,000.
The most precise way to know how many words per page are in your work is to use the word counter built into the writing program you are using, but that’s not always how you plan out you’re writing.
For anyone writing short stories, 5,000 words is a significant number, and knowing how many pages the piece will ultimately be is a valuable tool for you.
How Long Is 5000 Characters?
A set of 5,000 characters equals 35 to 84 sentences, with each sentence having 15 to 20 words. If spaces are counted, 5,000 characters may range from 710 to 1,250 words. If spaces are disregarded in the character count, the approximate word count is 830 to 1,670 words.
Different number of pages are generated based on the number of words, whether 3,000, 2,000, 1,500, 1,000, or 500 words.
The figures above are estimated using the research results done by Miller, Newman, and Friedman. According to their data, a function word’s average length is 3.13 letters, whereas a content word’s average length is 6.47 letters.
Aside from the word counts, the font size, font type, paragraph spacing settings, and margins all affect the exact number as to how many pages is 5,000 words.
