Why exclude function words?

Because a vocabulary list that opens with 的 is not useful. They are counted in the totals and in the coverage curve, just not shown as words to learn.

Can I get these as flashcards?

Yes — by HSK level, by book or by topic, exportable to Anki, Pleco, Quizlet or CSV with pinyin, meaning and real verses.

How many words appear only once?

2,579 of the 11,168 — so almost a quarter of the vocabulary can be skipped on a first reading.

3,253 Words Cover 95% of the Bible

Answering: “how many words to read the Bible”

Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON

Vocabulary, not characters, is what decides whether a verse makes sense. This curve is computed on segmented words: the text is split by matching the longest CC-CEDICT entry at each position, and each occurrence counted.

The practical reading of it: a learner with an HSK 4 vocabulary knows 63.2% of the word tokens here, and the gap to 95% is mostly proper names and terms of worship — the sort of vocabulary a Bible-specific deck teaches faster than a general course.

A book-by-book deck is the shortcut: John uses 1,647 distinct words in all, and its 200 most frequent content words already account for 39% of its word tokens — a far smaller job than the 11,168 words of the whole Bible, which is why every book here has a deck of its own.

The twelve most frequent content words

#	Word	Occurrences
1	说	8,851
2	人	8,743
3	耶和华	6,960
4	要	6,355
5	必	4,584
6	神	4,361
7	有	4,163
8	王	3,065
9	地	2,826
10	使	2,754
11	去	2,752
12	来	2,691

Function words (的, 了, 是 and the like) are excluded — they top every Chinese list and teach nothing.

Questions

Why exclude function words?: Because a vocabulary list that opens with 的 is not useful. They are counted in the totals and in the coverage curve, just not shown as words to learn.
Can I get these as flashcards?: Yes — by HSK level, by book or by topic, exportable to Anki, Pleco, Quizlet or CSV with pinyin, meaning and real verses.
How many words appear only once?: 2,579 of the 11,168 — so almost a quarter of the vocabulary can be skipped on a first reading.

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).