Tokens in Turkish

What the numbers say

The same website copy is 200 tokens in English and 262 tokens in Turkish on the newer o200k_base encoding, a ratio of 1.31×. On the older cl100k_base encoding the Turkish copy needs 342 tokens, which is 1.71× the English count of 200. At the same price per token, the same message costs about 1.31× as much in Turkish on the newer encoding. Among the 29 non-English languages we measured, Turkish ranks number 14 from the cheapest.

The newer encoding made a real difference: o200k_base used 23% fewer tokens than cl100k_base for Turkish, compared with 34% across all the non-English languages in the data. That is less than average, so Turkish gained less from the newer vocabulary than most.

Why Turkish? Turkish is agglutinative: suffixes are added to a word root one after another, so a single word can express what takes a whole phrase in English. Those long words are often cut into root and suffix pieces. A handful of letters, such as ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş and ü, are also two bytes each.

Languages written in the Latin alphabet share the letters English text uses, which are the best-represented in training data, so words are usually covered by a few tokens. Accented letters add a little, and long compound or suffixed words add more, but the cost stays within a modest multiple of English.

What it means for your bill

API prices are per token, so the ratio is also a price ratio. If a prompt costs $1.00 in English on o200k_base, the equivalent Turkish prompt costs about $1.31, and about $1.71 on cl100k_base. A document of 1,000 Turkish characters is roughly 282 tokens on o200k_base. These are estimates from one sample: translated text is never exactly the same length as the original, and your text may be formal, technical or full of names, which changes the ratio.

To turn tokens into money, enter your provider's input and output prices per million tokens in the token calculator. For how pricing works, see how LLM API pricing works.

How to use fewer tokens with Turkish text

1. Use a model with the newer tokenizer. For Turkish, o200k_base used 23% fewer tokens than cl100k_base in this sample, so a GPT-4o-class model needs fewer tokens than an older one for the same text.
2. Count before you send. Paste a typical message into the token calculator to see the real count, then multiply by the number of requests.
3. Keep fixed instructions short. A system prompt that is sent with every request is paid for every time. Writing the standing instructions in English is often cheaper per token than in Turkish; test that answers stay as good as you need.
4. Cut what is not needed. Remove greetings, repeated context and long examples. The guide to reducing token usage has more.
5. Be careful with emoji, rare characters and unusual formatting. They are often split into several byte-level tokens each.