500 words is about 1 page single-spaced or 2 pages double-spaced in 12 pt Times New Roman with 1 inch margins on US Letter paper. In 12 pt Arial, which is wider, the same text takes 1.1 pages single-spaced or 2.3 pages double-spaced. With 1.5 line spacing it is 1.5 pages, in Calibri 11 pt single-spaced 0.9 pages, and in Courier New double-spaced, the monospaced font used for screenplays and some manuscripts, 2.8 pages. On A4 paper the text area is slightly larger, so 500 words double-spaced in Times New Roman comes to 1.9 pages. Five hundred words is the classic short essay: an introduction, three body paragraphs and a conclusion of about 100 words each. It is also a common length for scholarship and application essays, a short news story, a product description page or a quick blog post. On a phone it fills roughly three screens. If you were asked for one page single-spaced, 500 words is the number most teachers have in mind, which is why the conventions of 250 words per double-spaced page and 500 per single-spaced page come from exactly this font and size. The calculator above opens with 500 words already entered; change the font, size, spacing, paper or margins and the page count updates, and the table compares every font at once. Reading 500 words silently takes about 2 min 6 sec at an average adult pace, and reading them aloud takes about 3 min 51 sec. To check the length of a draft, paste it into Word Counter. For nearby lengths see How Many Pages Is 750 Words?.
Page counts are an estimate because a page is not a fixed amount of text. What a page holds depends on how wide the letters of a font are, how tall each line is, how much of the page the margins take, and how the text is broken into paragraphs, since the last line of each paragraph is usually only partly filled. This converter starts from the convention most schools and editors use, 500 words for a single-spaced and 250 for a double-spaced page of 12 pt Times New Roman with 1 inch margins on US Letter, which already allows for normal paragraph breaks. Other fonts are scaled by their average character width and line height compared with Times New Roman: Courier New is monospaced and every character takes 0.6 of the font size, about 40 percent more than the average Times New Roman character, so it fits far fewer words. Line spacing multiplies the line height, so 1.5 spacing holds two thirds as much as single spacing and double spacing half as much. When an assignment gives a page count rather than a word count, the instructor almost always means double-spaced 12 pt Times New Roman or Arial with 1 inch margins unless the brief says otherwise. Title pages, reference lists and appendices are normally excluded from both page and word limits.