Why is the word count lower than a published English word count?

English counts are usually of running words (about 780,000 for the King James Bible), not of distinct words. The comparable figure here is word tokens, not the vocabulary size.

Where can I get these words as a deck?

The site publishes 97 ready-made decks — by HSK level, by book and by topic — and each exports to Anki, Pleco, Quizlet or CSV with pinyin, meaning and real verses.

How many of them are in the HSK lists?

HSK 1-9 covers 77.5% of word tokens; the remaining 22.5% are unlevelled.

Distinct Words in the Chinese Bible: 11,168

Answering: “how many words Chinese Bible”

Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON

Chinese is written without spaces, so a word count depends on how the text is split. Here the text is segmented by matching the longest dictionary entry at each position against CC-CEDICT; a different segmenter would give a slightly different total, which is why the method is stated rather than assumed.

11,168 distinct words is a vocabulary a committed learner can reach. The frequency curve is as steep as it is for characters: the 99 most common words account for half of all word tokens, and 1,900 words cover 90%.

The tail is long and mostly names. 2,579 words occur exactly once, 4,744 appear only in the Old Testament and 1,271 only in the New — so a reader who starts in the Gospels meets a smaller vocabulary than the whole-Bible figure suggests.

Words needed to cover the text

Share of word tokens	Most frequent words needed
50%	99
80%	825
90%	1,900
95%	3,253
99%	6,802

Questions

Why is the word count lower than a published English word count?: English counts are usually of running words (about 780,000 for the King James Bible), not of distinct words. The comparable figure here is word tokens, not the vocabulary size.
Where can I get these words as a deck?: The site publishes 97 ready-made decks — by HSK level, by book and by topic — and each exports to Anki, Pleco, Quizlet or CSV with pinyin, meaning and real verses.
How many of them are in the HSK lists?: HSK 1-9 covers 77.5% of word tokens; the remaining 22.5% are unlevelled.

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).