5,000 words is about 10 pages single-spaced or 20 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 11.4 pages single-spaced or 22.9 pages double-spaced. With 1.5 line spacing it is 15 pages, in Calibri 11 pt single-spaced 9.3 pages, and in Courier New double-spaced, the monospaced font used for screenplays and some manuscripts, 28.1 pages. On A4 paper the text area is slightly larger, so 5,000 words double-spaced in Times New Roman comes to 19.3 pages. Five thousand words is the length of a long research paper, a literature review, a dissertation or thesis chapter, or a longer short story. Twenty double-spaced pages is a document readers navigate rather than read straight through, so headings, a table of contents and consistent section lengths help. Dissertation chapters are often 5,000 to 10,000 words, so this is the low end for a chapter. As a talk it would take close to 40 minutes, more than most presentation slots allow. The calculator above opens with 5,000 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 5,000 words silently takes about 21 min 1 sec at an average adult pace, and reading them aloud takes about 38 min 28 sec. To check the length of a draft, paste it into Word Counter. For nearby lengths see How Many Pages Is 3,000 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.