How Long Is 200 Words?

Knowing the amount of words on a page or how long that amount of words are can be very useful when it comes to writing.

In certain professions where exact amounts of words cost money, in areas of schooling, and even in day to day personal writing projects, it is good to know how much you need to write before tiring yourself out or how much you need to write before it is complete.

Yet, it can still be quite difficult to understand exactly how long an amount of words is, even if you have been writing for a long period of time.

It gets even harder for smaller amounts, like 200 words. So, just how long is 200 words?

Is it a large amount of the page or a small amount? In this article, we seek to answer this question, so you don’t have to work it out on your own.

Factors That Affect A Word Count’s Length

Before we start off, we need to look at the variables that can affect word count and how it looks on the page.

One of the biggest factors in word count variation is that of the font and the font size.

Fonts come in different shapes and sizes, even if technically they are the same font size.

For example, Algerian font has longer letters than Calibri, which will make lines longer and so affect the word count length.

Likewise, font size will also affect how long 200 words is perceived to be.

If the font is below the usual size of 11, then it will take up less space on the page, but if it is above the usual size of 11, then it will take up more space on the page.

Something else to note is what the style or presentation is of the text you are writing upon.

Books tend to be A5 size and so 200 words will take up most of the page, but articles in a newspaper are much bigger and so it will probably take up much less space on the page, maybe even less than a column.

Finally, the overall design of the piece that you are reading can affect the length of 200 words on a page.

Do you use single spaces or double spaces? Are you adding pictures to the article?

Will you have large borders or small borders around the page?

These things all affect how long 200 words will be and how it will look on the page.

How Long Is 200 Words?

200 words is not that long at all, in fact it is a very small amount of words.

In order to demonstrate how long you should perceive 200 words to be, we are going to go through some examples of 200 words.

Since most people would be writing in Microsoft Word, we will use that example to begin with.

Using the font Times New Roman in a font size of 12 with the normal stylistic features provided by Microsoft when you first open the processor, then 200 words would cover at most a third of the entire page.

Using double-spacing instead of single spacing, 200 words would then cover two-thirds of a page.

Another example would be when you are reading a newspaper or an online article on a news site.

200 words in this example would probably amount to scrolling down a third of the article, depending on spacing – we are using CNN in our example.

This is because papers and websites use the space of the page for not just the article, but also for pictures, links, and advertising space.

A final quick example is one we mentioned earlier. That of A5 books, which is the standard size of most books.

200 words will take up between two-thirds and four-fifths of a page in these books, mainly because they are small in size and their borders are often large in nature.

You can probably see our point now that 200 words is not that much in length, in fact it is the exact middle size of most paragraphs, with many people writing paragraphs of between 100 and 300 words in them.

How Long Does 200 Words Take To Write?

This question is difficult to answer correctly, as there are a few variables that affect how long it would take a person to write 200 words, including the person’s writing ability, what they are writing about, and how well they can formulate sentences in their own mind.

For the average person, writing mostly consists of writing emails, rather than reams of texts quickly, for others they may never have to write that much at all, and others still might have jobs tailored to writing.

There are a few metrics that people use to measure how quickly someone can write, and you may see them in job interviews.

The most important is called ‘words per minute’ and it measures how much you can write in a minute.

Slow writers will write between 5 and 10 words per minute, and it takes them between 20 and 40 minutes to write 200 words.

Average writers will write between 35 and 45 words per minute, and it will take them between 4.4 minutes and 5.7 minutes to write 200 words.

And finally, fast writers will write between 60 and 70 words per minute, and it will take them between 2.8 minutes and 3.3 minutes to write 200 words.

Since there are so many different things that can cause you to write slowly or quickly – for example, distractions and ability – then it is important to see how long it takes you to write 200 words rather than relying on these metrics.

However, if you are really stuck, you can use them as a guideline.

Conclusion

200 words is roughly a third of a page in Microsoft Word and is not a lot to write.

However, it is a good measure to aim for per night if you have a long writing project, as it won’t be too mentally draining.