Guide
How many tokens is 1000 words?
About 1,330 tokens for plain English prose. The honest answer has a “for what text?” attached, because tokens are not words.
The numbers
| 1000 units of… | ≈ tokens |
|---|---|
| English words | 1,330 |
| Chinese characters | 600 |
English runs about 1.33 tokens per word. Chinese runs about 0.6 tokens per character — so 1000 Chinese characters cost less than half what 1000 English words cost, even though both are “1000 units”. Code is the opposite direction: symbols, indentation and short identifiers push it to roughly 1.5–2 tokens per word.
Why it matters
Token count is what you are billed for and what fills the context window. A 3000-word essay is about 4000 tokens in, before the model writes a word back. Paste the real text into the token counter — the estimate takes a second and beats any rule of thumb for your specific document.