How many words are in the Bible? (And verses, letters, pages)

The short answer

In English, the 66-book Protestant Bible runs to about 730,000 to 790,000 words, depending on the translation. By our count the King James Version has 790,676 words in 31,102 verses, and the modern World English Bible has 750,220. The figure most often quoted for the KJV, 783,137, comes from a count that does not give its method. The Old Testament holds about three-quarters of the words. A 73-book Catholic Bible has about 854,000 in the WEB, and the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew about 307,000.

In this guide

1. How many words are in the Bible, translation by translation
2. How many words are in the Catholic Bible, and the other canons?
3. Word count by testament and by book
4. How many unique words are in the Bible?
5. How many verses and letters are in the Bible?
6. How many words are in the Bible in Hebrew and Greek?
7. How many pages is the Bible?
8. What 750,000 words means in reading time
9. Questions people ask
10. Sources

Ask how many words are in the Bible and many answers give one number, 783,137, for the King James Version, with nothing on how it was counted. The real answer depends on the translation, on which books your Bible contains, and on the rules for what counts as a word. So we counted two public-domain translations ourselves, the King James Version and the modern World English Bible, wrote the rule down, and added the Catholic, Orthodox and other canons that most answers leave out.

• 790,676words in the King James Version, by our count
• 750,220in the World English Bible, a modern translation
• 853,665in a 73-book Catholic Bible
• 31,102verses, about 25 words each

How many words are in the Bible, translation by translation

The 66 books of the Protestant Bible come to between about 728,000 and 791,000 words in English, depending on the translation. Two of the figures below are our own counts. The others are as their sites report them, and neither site says how it counted.

Why the King James figure varies

The same 1769 text gives different totals under different rules. Here is what each choice is worth, measured on our text:

• The Psalm titles. This edition prints the heading most psalms carry, the line naming an author or occasion, as part of the first verse. The headings come to about a thousand words.
• Hyphenated names. Split Beth-el and Maher-shalal-hash-baz at every hyphen and the total rises by 808.
• Possessives. Count LORD’s as two words and it rises by 1,765.
• The italic words. Since the late 1600s, printers of the KJV have set in italics the words supplied to make the English read, which have no counterpart in the Hebrew or Greek. This text has 27,054 of them. Leave them out and the total falls to 763,622.

None of these lands on 783,137, and WordCounter’s page does not say how it counted, so the two figures cannot be reconciled exactly. Bible Memory Goal’s 790,678 lands within two words of ours.

Why modern translations come out shorter

The World English Bible has 40,456 fewer words than the King James Version, and more than half of that gap is a single word. The KJV uses and 51,708 times and opens 11,615 of its 31,102 verses with it. The WEB uses and 30,618 times, and only 44 of its verses open with a sentence that begins And.

How many words are in the Catholic Bible, and the other canons?

A 73-book Catholic Bible has about 854,000 words in the World English Bible, 103,445 more than the Protestant Bible. Christian traditions do not all read the same Old Testament, so the word count changes with the canon:

The seven books the Catholic Old Testament has and the Protestant one does not (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and 1 and 2 Maccabees) come to 97,997 words, and the longer Greek forms of Esther and Daniel add about 5,400 more. Catholics call these books deuterocanonical and many Protestants call them the Apocrypha; our guide to the Catholic and Protestant Bibles explains how the two came to differ. The “With Apocrypha” row is the Catholic books plus 1 and 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh, as Anglican Bibles print the Apocrypha. The Orthodox row, as BibleRing counts that canon, adds 3 and 4 Maccabees and Psalm 151.

The Ethiopian figure is a floor, not a total. The Old Testament of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church includes Enoch, Jubilees, 4 Baruch and the three books of Meqabyan, none of which is in the World English Bible, so we have no comparable count for them. It also reads the Meqabyan where the Catholic and Orthodox canons read 1 and 2 Maccabees, which is why the part we can count comes out below the Catholic total. Our guide to the Ethiopian Bible goes through its books.

Word count by testament and by book

The Old Testament holds a little over three-quarters of the Bible’s words: 575,397 of the World English Bible’s 750,220, and 610,281 of the KJV’s 790,676. The New Testament has 174,823 words in the WEB and 180,395 in the KJV.

The eight divisions

Grouped the way BibleRing colors them, the Protestant Bible’s words fall like this:

The History books are the largest block of words. Wisdom has almost as many chapters as the Prophets but barely half their words, because most of its chapters are psalms. The Gospels have the longest chapters of any division, about 900 words on average.

The longest and shortest books

Psalms has the most words, 41,314 in the World English Bible and 43,716 in the KJV, and 3 John the fewest, 292 in the WEB and 294 in the KJV. Here are the ten longest:

And the ten shortest:

The King James Version ranks them the same way, except that 2 Chronicles edges past Luke and 2 Thessalonians comes in shorter than Haggai. The full ranking, by chapters and verses as well as words, is in our guide to the longest and shortest books of the Bible.

How many unique words are in the Bible?

The King James Version uses 12,773 different words by our count, and 4,033 of them appear only once. These are word forms with capitals ignored, so LORD and Lord are one form, but every spelling counts on its own: whale and whales are two. A count of dictionary words, which would fold begat, beget and begotten into one, comes out lower. Among the words used once are gopher, for the wood of Noah’s ark in Genesis 6:14, and whales in Genesis 1:21.

The World English Bible uses 12,734 forms, nearly the same vocabulary in 40,000 fewer words, with 3,918 of them used once. The words each translation leans on show how the two differ:

Counting a single name runs into translation too. English Bibles commonly print LORD, in capitals, in place of the Hebrew name of God, and the KJV prints it 6,462 times, or 6,570 counting LORD’s. The World English Bible writes that name as Yahweh: 5,659 times, or 6,836 counting Yahweh’s. So lord, in any capitals, appears 7,836 times in the KJV and 1,360 times in the WEB.

How many verses and letters are in the Bible?

The Protestant Bible has 31,102 verses as the King James Version numbers them, 23,145 in the Old Testament and 7,957 in the New, and the KJV’s text has 3,226,452 letters by our count. That works out to about 25 words a verse and a little over four letters a word.

• The longest verse is Esther 8:9, at 90 words in the KJV (86 in the WEB): the king’s scribes writing out Mordecai’s decree for 127 provinces, from India to Ethiopia.
• The shortest verses are John 11:35, “Jesus wept.”, and 1 Thessalonians 5:16, two words each in both translations. The WEB gives Job 3:2 two words as well, where the KJV takes five.
• Esther has the longest verses on average, about 34 words in the KJV, and Proverbs the shortest, about 16.
• The longest chapter is Psalm 119, with 176 verses and 2,423 words in the KJV. The shortest is Psalm 117: 2 verses, 33 words.

For the chapters and verses of every book, see our guide to how many chapters are in the Bible.

How many words are in the Bible in Hebrew and Greek?

In its original languages the Bible has far fewer words than in English. The Hebrew Bible, whose 24 books Protestant Bibles divide into the 39 of their Old Testament, has 306,757 words and 1,202,972 letters by the count of Bar-Ilan University’s Responsa Project. The Greek New Testament has 138,020 words in OverviewBible’s count of the NA27 edition.

The first verse of the Bible shows why English needs more. Genesis 1:1 is seven words in Hebrew, Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz, and ten in the World English Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Hebrew writes in, the and and as prefixes joined to the next word (be-, ha-, ve-), so four of those seven Hebrew words carry an English word of their own inside them.

Counts of the Hebrew vary more than counts of the English. OverviewBible’s table, made with Bible software, adds up to 473,204 words for the Old Testament and 611,224 for the whole Bible in its original languages, far above the Responsa Project’s figure. Neither source says how it divides a word, but with prefixes like these, what counts as one Hebrew word is a choice the counter makes, and the total follows it.

How many pages is the Bible?

There is no single page count for the Bible: it depends on the edition’s type size, its page size and what is printed beside the text. Two editions of the same translation from the same publisher show the range:

Larger type on a larger page adds only 64 pages. Study notes, cross-references, maps and a concordance all add more, and so do the deuterocanonical books in a Catholic edition. A page count you find online describes one edition, whichever it happened to be.

What 750,000 words means in reading time

A modern translation of the Protestant Bible takes about 52 hours to read silently at 238 words a minute, the average adult pace for non-fiction found in a 2019 review of reading-speed studies, and the King James Version about 55. At a relaxed 200 words a minute, a modern translation takes about 62 hours. Our guide to how long it takes to read the Bible breaks that down by book and by canon.

Reading plans are counted in chapters rather than words, because a chapter is where a Bible lets you stop. Spread over a year, 750,220 words comes to about 2,050 a day; in chapters, it is a little over three a day, about 11 minutes of reading. Our guide to reading the Bible in a year compares the ways to do it.

English Bibles almost all divide the 66 books into the same 1,189 chapters, so whichever translation is on your shelf, the count you keep can be the same.

Questions people ask

How many words are in the King James Bible?

By our count of the standard 1769 text, 790,676, with 610,281 in the Old Testament and 180,395 in the New. Other published figures run from 783,137 to 790,678. Counting rules move the total. Leaving out the Psalm titles or the words the KJV prints in italics lowers it, and splitting hyphenated names raises it.

How many words are in the Catholic Bible?

About 854,000 in the World English Bible's translation, by our count, across the 73 books of the Catholic canon. Its seven deuterocanonical books (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and 1 and 2 Maccabees) come to 97,997 words, and the longer Greek forms of Esther and Daniel add about 5,400 more.

How many unique words are in the Bible?

The King James Version uses 12,773 different word forms by our count, ignoring capitals, and 4,033 of them appear only once. These are spellings rather than dictionary entries, so whale and whales count as two. The World English Bible, with 40,000 fewer words in all, uses 12,734 forms.

How many letters are in the Bible?

The King James Version has 3,226,452 letters by our count, a little over four letters a word. The Hebrew Bible, in Hebrew, has 1,202,972 letters according to the count of Bar-Ilan University's Responsa Project, which also puts its words at 306,757.

Which book of the Bible has the most words?

Psalms, with 43,716 words in the King James Version and 41,314 in the World English Bible, about 5.5% of the whole Bible. Jeremiah is a close second in English, and in OverviewBible's count of the original Hebrew it comes first. The shortest book is 3 John, at 294 words in the KJV.

Sources

1. King James Version, verse-per-line edition (public domain), eBible.org
2. World English Bible, verse-per-line edition (public domain), eBible.org
3. Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047.
4. How Many Words Are in the Bible? (WordCounter, December 8, 2015)
5. Bible books word count (Bible Memory Goal)
6. Statistics of the Hebrew Bible (Wikipedia)
7. Word counts for every book of the Bible (Jeffrey Kranz, OverviewBible, 2014)
8. Genesis 1:1 (Wikipedia)
9. Prefixes in Hebrew (Wikipedia)
10. Tetragrammaton (Wikipedia)
11. King James Version (Wikipedia)
12. Biblical canon (Wikipedia)
13. ESV Thinline Bible, TruTone (Crossway)
14. ESV Large Print Value Thinline Bible, TruTone (Crossway)