The Average Bible Verse Is 30 Characters
Answering: “average verse length in Chinese”
Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON
Thirty characters is about fifteen to twenty words of Chinese, or roughly a line and a half on a phone. It is a useful figure for anyone planning a reading habit: a chapter of 775 characters is under four minutes at a fluent pace, and slower when every third word is new.
The spread is wide. The longest verse, Jeremiah 43:5, runs 97 characters; at the other end sit the four-character commandments of Exodus 20 and John 11:35 (耶稣哭了).
Verse length varies by genre more than by book: narrative and law run long, poetry short. The table gives the books with the longest and shortest average verse.
Across the whole text that is 921,149 characters in 31,021 verses, and about 21 segmented words in an average verse — enough that one unknown word in twenty tokens still means most verses contain one.
| Book | Avg characters/verse | Verses | Characters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Malachi | 42 | 55 | 2,310 |
| Jeremiah | 37 | 1,361 | 50,586 |
| Zephaniah | 37 | 52 | 1,939 |
| 2 Kings | 36 | 719 | 26,180 |
| 2 Chronicles | 36 | 821 | 29,469 |
| Ephesians | 26 | 154 | 3,938 |
| Philemon | 24 | 25 | 601 |
| Psalms | 22 | 2,452 | 53,904 |
| Job | 20 | 1,067 | 20,857 |
| Proverbs | 19 | 913 | 16,973 |
Questions
- How many words is that?
- About 21 segmented words per verse on average.
- How long does a chapter take to read?
- An average chapter is 775 characters, about 3 minutes at 260 characters a minute.
- Are verse divisions original?
- No. Chapter and verse divisions are editorial, added long after the texts were written, which is why counts differ slightly between editions.
Related reference pages
Take it further
- 97 ready-made vocabulary decks — by HSK level, by book or by topic, exportable to Anki, Pleco or Quizlet.
- Printable 田字格 worksheets — passages with pinyin, meanings and tracing rows.
- The parallel reader — Chinese, pinyin and your own language side by side, every word tappable.
- The dataset behind these numbers — plain JSON, free to reuse with attribution.
How these numbers were produced
- Text: 和合本 (Chinese Union Version), simplified script — public domain — 66 books, 1,189 chapters, 31,021 verses.
- Words: forward maximum matching against CC-CEDICT (this site's own segmentation). A different segmenter gives slightly different word counts; character counts are unaffected.
- HSK levels: HSK 3.0 levels from the complete-hsk-vocabulary list; band 7 covers HSK 7-9.
- Reading times: 260 characters a minute — an assumption about a fluent adult reader, not a measurement.
- Computed: 2026-09-22, from the text on this site.
These are counts anyone can reproduce from the published dataset. They are not a peer-reviewed linguistic study, and the difficulty rankings are one stated formula rather than a validated readability score.
Definitions: CC-CEDICT, licensed CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). If you share this file onward, keep this notice and share alike. Character data: Make Me a Hanzi (Arphic Public License / LGPL).