Eight Pages or Three, and the Word Count Did Not Change

Where the 250-word page comes from

It is a typewriter measurement that outlived the typewriter. A sheet with an inch of margin all round, typed in a fixed-width face at double spacing, holds about twenty-five lines of roughly ten words. Publishers counted manuscripts in those pages because they were interchangeable — every typewriter produced the same page — and the convention survived the move to word processors because it was already what every contract and every submission guideline was written in. It is why a 400-page novel is described as around 100,000 words, and why a manuscript is still asked for double-spaced in a plain face: not for beauty, but so that a page means the same thing on both desks.

Reading it and saying it are two more numbers

The same 2,000 words take about 8.4 minutes to read silently, at the rate an adult reads prose, and around 13 minutes 20 seconds to say aloud at a presentation pace. Those three answers — pages, reading minutes, speaking minutes — are the three that a piece of writing is usually judged by, and they do not move together. Cutting a page from a double-spaced essay removes 250 words and about a minute of reading; cutting a minute from a talk removes 150 words and less than a page. Deciding which constraint is the real one before editing saves cutting the wrong things.

Frequently asked questions

My tutor asked for ten pages. How many words is that?

2,500 if the brief means double-spaced 12 point, which is what an academic brief usually means, and 5,000 if it means single-spaced. The gap is large enough that it is worth asking rather than guessing — and if the brief also names a font and a margin, it has already answered: those three settings are what a page count actually specifies.

How long is a novel in pages?

An 80,000-word novel — a common length for adult fiction — is 320 manuscript pages double-spaced and about 267 printed pages at paperback density. The manuscript is always longer than the book, which is worth knowing before a page count causes alarm: nothing has to be cut for the printed edition to look normal.

Does the paper size change the answer?

A little, and in the direction people forget. A page of US Letter is shorter than a page of A4 by about 18 mm, so the same layout fits roughly one line less per page — over a long document that is a page or two. It is the same reason a document written on one and printed on the other reflows: the layout was fitted to a sheet that is not the sheet in the tray.