64.8% of Bible Words Are One Character
Answering: “how long are Chinese Bible words”
Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON
Chinese is written without spaces, so word length only exists once the text is segmented. Segmented as described below, the Bible's words split cleanly: 2,336 distinct single-character words account for 64.8% of everything on the page, while 8,269 distinct two-character words account for 32.4%.
That inversion is the interesting part. Most of the *vocabulary* is two characters long — 3.5 times as many distinct words as the single-character set — but most of the *text* is single characters, because the shortest words are the grammatical ones that repeat endlessly.
Longer words exist and are worth knowing about: 563 distinct words run to three characters or more, largely transliterated names and set phrases. The longest entries reach six characters. For a learner the lesson is that two-character words are where the meaning lives, which is also how the decks on this site are weighted.
| Characters | Distinct words | Occurrences | Share of the text |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2,336 | 429,944 | 64.8% |
| 2 | 8,269 | 214,830 | 32.4% |
| 3 | 338 | 15,007 | 2.3% |
| 4 | 217 | 3,958 | 0.6% |
| 5 | 7 | 130 | 0% |
| 6 | 1 | 7 | 0% |
Reduplicated words such as 谢谢 are counted as two characters; there are 80 of them.
Questions
- Does a different segmenter change this?
- Yes, at the margin: forward maximum matching against CC-CEDICT (this site's own segmentation) favours the longest dictionary match, which produces more two-character words than a segmenter that splits aggressively.
- Which single characters are the most common?
- 的 他 你 我 们 人 在 和 — mostly particles and pronouns.
- How many words are there in total?
- 11,168 distinct words across 663,876 tokens.
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).