Approximately how many tokens does the word 'Claude' represent in typical English text processing?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation and Infographic
Common words like 'Claude' are typically encoded as a single token. Longer or rare words might break into multiple tokens — 'tokenization' might become 2-3 tokens.
Full explanation below image
Full Explanation
Tokenization splits text into subword units. Common English words are usually single tokens, while longer or uncommon words are split into multiple tokens. As a rule of thumb, 1 token ≈ 4 characters or ≈ 0.75 words for typical English prose. 'Claude' is a short common word and represents approximately 1 token. Option B (one per character) describes a character-level tokenizer, not the subword tokenizers used by Claude. Option C is nonsensical — you can't have a quarter of a token in practice. Option D greatly overestimates the token count for a short word.