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It varies a lot by model, tokenizer, and language.

For DeekSeek 1 token ~= 3 English characters.

See: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/token_usage/

It comes out to around 1-3 words/second. This is not so slow that it's maddening (ex 2 token/second is frustratingly slow, like walk away and make coffee while it's answering slow), but it's still slow enough to make it hard to functionally use and not break flow state. You get bored and distracted reading at that pace.

Something in between. example: https://gpt-tokenizer.dev/

Looks like for the most part it's words, but some longer words get broken at prefix/suffix boundaries.

It typically somewhere between 3 to 5 characters.