# Is 512 token in bert, token or character level?
**URL:**
**Author:**  [@moma1820](/static-proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdiscuss.huggingface.co%2Fu%2Fmoma1820)%5C
**Post date:** [April 3, 2022, 8:07am UTC](/static-proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdiscuss.huggingface.co%2Ft%2Fis-512-token-in-bert-token-or-character-level%2F16406%2F1 "2022-04-03T08:07:23Z")
Hi,
I am super puzzled, if bert 512 token count is character or word level.
So for all the resources say it’s word level.
Would appreciate if someone fills me in .
Best,
Mosh
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**Author:**  [@julien-c](/static-proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdiscuss.huggingface.co%2Fu%2Fjulien-c)%5C
**Post date:** [April 3, 2022, 5:57pm UTC](/static-proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdiscuss.huggingface.co%2Ft%2Fis-512-token-in-bert-token-or-character-level%2F16406%2F2 "2022-04-03T17:57:25Z")
BERT’s tokenizer, Wordpiece, is a subword tokenizer.
See example at [Summary of the tokenizers](https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/tokenizer_summary)
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**Author:**  [@arteagac](/static-proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdiscuss.huggingface.co%2Fu%2Farteagac)%5C
**Post date:** [April 3, 2022, 8:31pm UTC](/static-proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdiscuss.huggingface.co%2Ft%2Fis-512-token-in-bert-token-or-character-level%2F16406%2F3 "2022-04-03T20:31:21Z")
BERT uses a subword tokenizer (WordPiece), so the maximum length corresponds to 512 subword tokens. See the example below, in which the input sentence has eight words, but the tokenizer generates a sequence with length equal to nine. Note that the extra token in this example is due to the word `outstandingly`, which the subword tokenizer represents using two tokens: `outstanding` and `##ly`.
```python
>>> from transformers import AutoTokenizer
>>> tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("bert-base-uncased")
>>> tokenizer.tokenize("The outstandingly big cat sat on the mat")
```
```bash
OUTPUT:
['the', 'outstanding', '##ly', 'big', 'cat', 'sat', 'on', 'the', 'mat']
```
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**Author:**  [@moma1820](/static-proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdiscuss.huggingface.co%2Fu%2Fmoma1820)%5C
**Post date:** [April 4, 2022, 6:16am UTC](/static-proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdiscuss.huggingface.co%2Ft%2Fis-512-token-in-bert-token-or-character-level%2F16406%2F4 "2022-04-04T06:16:48Z")
Thank you for the reply guys,
So lets say i have a 512 word sentece as input. And let’s say some word were tokenized into formats like ‘outstanding’ → ‘outstanding’, ‘##ly’.
So i’m assuming some words at the end of the sentences will be turncated after tokenization ?
Best,
Mosh