Is that brush strokes or pen strokes?

The same count either way: a stroke here is one continuous pen movement as taught in stroke-order instruction, not a measure of ink or effort.

Which characters are missing from the count?

14 rare characters have no published stroke data, together accounting for a fraction of a percent of the text — the coverage figure states exactly how much.

Can I practise writing these?

Yes. Every word page has a printable 田字格 sheet with animated stroke order, and the printable worksheets do the same for whole passages.

Writing the Chinese Bible: 6,505,819 Strokes

Answering: “how many strokes to write the Bible”

Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON

Every Chinese character is written in a fixed number of strokes, and the stroke data for 2,982 of the Bible's 2,996 distinct characters is published openly (Make Me a Hanzi). Multiplying each character's stroke count by how often it occurs gives the total for the whole text: 6,505,819 strokes, covering 100% of the characters on the page.

The averages are the more useful numbers. A character occurrence averages 7.06 strokes, but a *distinct* character averages 9.63 — the gap is the whole story of Chinese frequency: the characters you meet constantly are the simple ones. The most complex characters in the text are 纛 (25), 蠹 (24), 罐 (23), 囊 (22), and between them they occur a handful of times.

For scale: hand-copying the Bible in a year means about 17,824 strokes a day, and the shortest book in it comes to roughly 2,775. This site generates 田字格 practice sheets for any word with animated stroke order, which is the practical version of this number.

Strokes, by the numbers

Measure	Value
Total strokes in the text	6,505,819
Characters counted	100% of 921,149
Average per character occurrence	7.06
Average per distinct character	9.63
Distinct characters with stroke data	2,982 of 2,996
Most complex characters	纛 25, 蠹 24, 罐 23, 囊 22, 蘸 22

Questions

Is that brush strokes or pen strokes?: The same count either way: a stroke here is one continuous pen movement as taught in stroke-order instruction, not a measure of ink or effort.
Which characters are missing from the count?: 14 rare characters have no published stroke data, together accounting for a fraction of a percent of the text — the coverage figure states exactly how much.
Can I practise writing these?: Yes. Every word page has a printable 田字格 sheet with animated stroke order, and the printable worksheets do the same for whole passages.

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).