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How many tokens is a word?

Updated 2026-05-31 · By Clinton Patrick · Methodology

The short answer

In typical English text, 1 word ≈ 1.3 tokens across most modern AI tokenizers (GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini). Or, conversely, 1,000 tokens ≈ 750 words.

Single short common words ("the", "and", "cat") are usually 1 token. Longer or less common words ("antidisestablishmentarianism", "tokenization") split into 2-5 pieces.

Why words don't map cleanly to tokens

Tokenizers don't split on whitespace, they split on subword units learned from training data. The most common letter sequences become single tokens; rare sequences split into multiple.

A few examples (GPT-4o's o200k_base tokenizer):

• cat → 1 token
• tokenizer → 1 token (common in AI training data)
• tokenization → 2 tokens (token + ization)
• pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis → 13 tokens

Punctuation, leading whitespace, and capitalization all affect tokenization too. cat (with leading space) is a different token than cat.

Practical estimation

Rough rules of thumb for English:

For non-English languages, the ratio shifts substantially:

• Chinese / Japanese with o200k_base tokenizer: ~2-3 tokens per character (vs. ~1.3 per English word)
• Code: 10-20% more tokens than equivalent prose
• Numbers and identifiers: usually 1 token per ~3 digits

Get an exact count

Paste your text into the counter, it shows the exact token count for your input across every supported model. Different models have different tokenizers, so the count varies by 5-20% across providers for the same text.

Try this on every model

• Claude Opus 4.8 $5.00/$25.00
• Claude Opus 4.8 (Fast Mode) $10.00/$50.00
• Claude Sonnet 4.6 $3.00/$15.00
• Claude Haiku 4.5 $1.00/$5.00
• GPT-5.5 $5.00/$30.00
• GPT-5.5 Pro $30.00/$180.00
• GPT-5.4 $2.50/$15.00
• GPT-5.4 Mini $0.75/$4.50
• GPT-5.4 Nano $0.20/$1.25
• GPT-5.4 Pro $30.00/$180.00
• GPT-5.3 $1.75/$14.00
• GPT-5.2 $1.75/$14.00
• GPT-5.2 Pro $21.00/$168.00
• GPT-5.1 $1.25/$10.00
• GPT-5 $1.25/$10.00
• GPT-5 Mini $0.25/$2.00
• GPT-5 Nano $0.05/$0.40
• GPT-5 Pro $15.00/$120.00
• GPT-4.1 $2.00/$8.00
• GPT-4.1 Mini $0.40/$1.60
• GPT-4.1 Nano $0.10/$0.40
• o3 $2.00/$8.00
• o3-mini $1.10/$4.40
• o3-pro $20.00/$80.00
• o4-mini $1.10/$4.40
• GPT-4o $2.50/$10.00
• GPT-4o mini $0.15/$0.60
• GPT-4 Turbo $10.00/$30.00
• Gemini 3.1 Pro $2.00/$12.00
• Gemini 3 Flash $0.50/$3.00
• Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite $0.25/$1.50
• Gemini 2.5 Pro $1.25/$10.00
• Gemini 2.5 Flash $0.30/$2.50
• Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite $0.10/$0.40
• Llama 3.3 70B $0.88/$0.88
• Llama 3.1 405B $3.50/$3.50
• Llama 3.1 70B $0.59/$0.79
• Llama 3.1 8B $0.18/$0.18
• Mistral Large $2.00/$6.00
• DeepSeek V3 $0.27/$1.10
• DeepSeek V3.1 $0.60/$1.70
• DeepSeek R1 $3.00/$7.00
• Qwen 2.5 72B $0.90/$0.90
• Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B $0.80/$0.80
• Qwen3 Coder 480B $2.00/$2.00
• GLM-5.1 $1.40/$4.40

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