Chinese Characters in the Bible: 921,149
Answering: “how many Chinese characters in the Bible”
Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON
This is a count of character occurrences, not of distinct characters: punctuation and Latin text are excluded, and a character that appears a thousand times is counted a thousand times. The number of *different* characters needed is much smaller — 2,996.
The Old Testament accounts for most of the length. Of the 921,149 characters, 699,012 are in the 39 Old Testament books and 222,137 in the 27 books of the New Testament.
At 260 characters a minute — a fluent adult reading pace, and an assumption rather than a measurement — the whole text is about 59 hours of reading. An average verse runs 30 characters and an average chapter 775.
For comparison with the vocabulary figures: those 921,149 character occurrences resolve into 663,876 words once the text is segmented, drawn from 11,168 distinct words. The longest single verse, Jeremiah 43:5, is 97 characters.
| Book | Characters | Chapters | Verses |
|---|---|---|---|
| Psalms | 53,904 | 150 | 2,452 |
| Jeremiah | 50,586 | 52 | 1,361 |
| Genesis | 44,626 | 50 | 1,532 |
| Isaiah | 43,651 | 66 | 1,290 |
| Ezekiel | 42,983 | 48 | 1,270 |
| Numbers | 36,709 | 36 | 1,272 |
| Exodus | 35,177 | 40 | 1,212 |
| Deuteronomy | 31,448 | 34 | 951 |
| Luke | 30,495 | 24 | 1,146 |
| 2 Chronicles | 29,469 | 36 | 821 |
Every one of the 66 books has its own page with the same figures.
Questions
- Which edition is being counted?
- The 和合本 (Chinese Union Version), simplified script — public domain It is public domain, and it is the text this site displays.
- How many distinct characters does that involve?
- 2,996 distinct characters, of which the 971 most frequent cover 95% of all occurrences.
- Does the traditional-character edition have the same count?
- The same, character for character: the two editions of these verses differ in how 1,909 characters are written, not in how many there are.
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).