What is the average letters in a word

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Got a version of Word that uses the ribbon interface Word or later? This site is for you! If you use an earlier version of Word, visit our WordTips site focusing on the menu interface. View the most recent newsletter. Toggle navigation. Calculating Average Word Length. Figure 1. The Word Count dialog box.

You do this by following these steps: Display the Word Options dialog box. In Word click the Office button and then click Word Options. In later versions of Word display the File tab of the ribbon and then click Options.

At the left side of the dialog box click Proofing. See Figure 2. Figure 2. The Proofing options of the Word Options dialog box. Make sure the Check Grammar with spelling check box is selected. Make sure the Show Readability Statistics check box is selected. Click on OK. Figure 3. The Readability Statistics dialog box. If you would like to know how to use the macros described on this page or on any other page on the WordTips sites , I've prepared a special page that includes helpful information.

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More WordTips ribbon. I had an intuition that German, for example, would have a very long average word length and distribution of word lengths, due to their practice of mashing together multiple words. The visualization below shows several languages visualized based on word lengths. The bar chart is a histogram of word lengths, and to the right is displayed the average word length in each language. When I recommend to my clients that they limit their word length to 5 characters per word, they roll their eyes and chortle.

The Wall Street Journal also accomplishes this feat , day after day, rarely rubbing its head against the 5-character ceiling. Because every syllable you include adds a fraction of a second of processing time. Those fractions of seconds add up to more effort for the reader — a primary cause of lost readership.

We analyzed all stories in one edition of The New York Times. We skipped the sports pages, thinking they would skew our results.

On that day, Times words:. Could you make big stories more accessible to more people if it were shorter? The Times makes big, complex stories accessible to millions of people through words that average 5 characters or less, like these:. These, from the Times , weigh in at:. Of course, even the Times occasionally gets it wrong. Avoid writing long words like these, which weigh in at ….

Learn more about writing short words. Yes, the research says. The shorter your message, the more likely readers are to read it, understand it and make good decisions based on it.

So how long is too long?