Is that enough to read a newspaper too?

Partly. The Bible's 2,996 characters overlap heavily with everyday vocabulary, but Scripture also uses names and cultic terms a newspaper never does — 662 of the words here look like proper names, and 22.5% of word tokens are outside the HSK lists.

Which book uses the fewest different characters?

2 John, with 151 distinct characters across 393 characters of text.

How many distinct words is that?

11,168 distinct words, once the text is segmented into words rather than characters.

The Chinese Bible Uses 2,996 Characters

Answering: “how many unique characters Chinese Bible”

Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON

2,996 distinct characters is a smaller number than most learners expect, and it is a far smaller number than the 921,149 character occurrences in the text. It is also close to the size of a general-purpose literacy target: the HSK 3.0 lists cover roughly three thousand characters.

Because character frequency is steeply uneven, partial knowledge goes a long way. The curve below says how many of the most frequent characters are needed to cover a given share of every character occurrence in the Bible.

The 32 characters that occur in all 66 books are the ones worth knowing first: 是的行在要有就了为这一出来并都大. At the other end, 2,579 words occur exactly once in the entire Bible.

Characters needed to cover the text

Share of the text	Most frequent characters needed
50%	73
80%	355
90%	648
95%	971
99%	1,699

Counted over all character occurrences in the simplified text, punctuation excluded.

Questions

Is that enough to read a newspaper too?: Partly. The Bible's 2,996 characters overlap heavily with everyday vocabulary, but Scripture also uses names and cultic terms a newspaper never does — 662 of the words here look like proper names, and 22.5% of word tokens are outside the HSK lists.
Which book uses the fewest different characters?: 2 John, with 151 distinct characters across 393 characters of text.
How many distinct words is that?: 11,168 distinct words, once the text is segmented into words rather than characters.

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).