Why do other sites say 31,102 verses?

That is the traditional count for the King James Bible. Editions differ in verse division and in which verses carry text; 31,021 is what this edition contains.

Is the pinyin on every verse?

Yes — pinyin is generated for the whole text and shown as its own column, and it is also available per word.

Which is the shortest verse in Chinese?

In this edition Job 3:2 is a single character (说, "said"), an artefact of how the verse is divided. The shortest verse people usually mean is John 11:35, 耶稣哭了, four characters. The longest is Jeremiah 43:5 at 97.

Verses in the Chinese Bible: 31,021

Answering: “how many verses in the Bible”

Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON

Verse counts differ slightly between editions, because verse division is editorial rather than original. 31,021 is the count in the Chinese Union Version (和合本, simplified) as published on this site — the number of verses that actually carry Chinese text.

The average verse is 30 Chinese characters long. The longest is Jeremiah 43:5 at 97 characters; the shortest carrying real content are the four-character commandments in Exodus 20 and John 11:35, 耶稣哭了 — "Jesus wept" — also four characters.

Every verse has its own page with the Chinese text, the pinyin, the reader's own language and a word-by-word breakdown, and the 1,189 chapter pages give the same in parallel columns.

Spread across the canon, that is 470 verses per book and 26 per chapter on average, though the range is wide: the shortest books run to a few dozen verses and Psalms alone carries 2,452.

Where the verses are

Part	Books	Chapters	Verses	Characters
Whole Bible	66	1,189	31,021	921,149
Old Testament	39	929	23,081	699,012
New Testament	27	260	7,940	222,137
Psalms	1	150	2,452	53,904
Genesis	1	50	1,532	44,626
Jeremiah	1	52	1,361	50,586
Isaiah	1	66	1,290	43,651
Numbers	1	36	1,272	36,709

The last five rows are the books with the most verses.

Questions

Why do other sites say 31,102 verses?: That is the traditional count for the King James Bible. Editions differ in verse division and in which verses carry text; 31,021 is what this edition contains.
Is the pinyin on every verse?: Yes — pinyin is generated for the whole text and shown as its own column, and it is also available per word.
Which is the shortest verse in Chinese?: In this edition Job 3:2 is a single character (说, "said"), an artefact of how the verse is divided. The shortest verse people usually mean is John 11:35, 耶稣哭了, four characters. The longest is Jeremiah 43:5 at 97.

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).