# Chinese Characters in the Bible: 921,149

> The Chinese Union Version (和合本, simplified) is written with 921,149 Chinese characters in total, spread over 31,021 verses, 1,189 chapters and 66 books.

Question: how many Chinese characters in the Bible
Answer: 921,149
Page: https://chinese-bible.com/en/reference/how-many-chinese-characters-in-the-bible

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.

## The ten longest books by character count

| 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.

## Method

- Text: 和合本 (Chinese Union Version), simplified script — public domain
- Words: forward maximum matching against CC-CEDICT (this site's own segmentation)
- 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)
- Computed: 2026-09-22

These are reproducible counts over a public-domain text, not a peer-reviewed study. Difficulty ranks are one stated formula, not a validated readability score.


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- 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).
- Bible text: public domain — 和合本 · World English Bible · Louis Segond 1910.
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