My brief research into the English language revealed the average character count of a word is eight. Throw together a bunch of a smaller and bigger words, some single spaces and punctuation and you roughly end up with the average 140-character tweet being somewhere between 14 and 20 words. Let’s call it 15.
That contradicts the common wisdom I’ve heard: the average word is 5 letters, so divide your character count by 6 to get a word count.
But that was a rule of thumb from the days of typewriters. Hypertext and formatting changes things. For example, every time you see something in boldface on my blog, there are an extra 17 characters for the HTML code, <strong></strong>, that makes the text bold.
Just to poke at the problem, I used wc to find the number of characters per word in a few documents. What I found supports the 6 characters per word rule of thumb for content, but not for HTML code. The number of characters per word in HTML was higher then 6, and varied greatly.
The text of the front page article on today’s New York Times was 5880 characters, 960 words: 6 characters per word.
The plain text of Rand’s webpage claiming 15 chars per word was 6794 characters, 1175 words: 6 words per character. By plain text, I mean just the words of the HTML after it was rendered, so formatting, images, links, etc were ignored. The HTML source for the page, however, was 15952 characters, meaning 14 words per character.
What about technical stuff? The best paper I read last year was Some thoughts on security after ten years of qmail 1.0 (PDF). It has no pictures, just 9517 formatted words. A PDF represents it with 161496 bytes (17 bytes per word), but ignoring formatting it is 62567 characters (7 characters per word).
I’m still looking into how long English words are in practice. Please share your research, if you have an opinion.