The Readable Line-Length Range for Body Text
A body paragraph on a wide desktop monitor stretches edge-to-edge, rendering at roughly 130 characters per line.
Per the readability range this subject describes for body copy, what's the actual target range for characters per line (including spaces)?
The correct answer is "~50-75 characters."
The readable range for body text is roughly 50-75 characters per
line, sometimes stated as "an alphabet and a half." At 130
characters, the paragraph is far past that ceiling: by the time the
eye reaches the end of a line, it has to travel a long way back to
find the start of the next one, and readers lose their place and
re-read lines — this is exactly why well-designed body copy is
constrained with a max-width even on a wide screen, not because
designers dislike whitespace.
The distractors miss the actual range: 20-30 characters is closer to the too-short failure mode, which breaks reading rhythm into a choppy stutter from jumping lines too often; 100-120 is still well past the readable ceiling, just less extreme than 130; and there is a real functional range here — it isn't something line-height alone can compensate for, since the problem is the saccade distance, not the vertical spacing.
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