# Distinct Words in the Chinese Bible: 11,168

> Segmented into words, the Chinese Union Version (和合本, simplified) contains 663,876 word tokens drawn from 11,168 distinct words.

Question: how many words Chinese Bible
Answer: 11,168
Page: https://chinese-bible.com/en/reference/how-many-words

Chinese is written without spaces, so a word count depends on how the text is split. Here the text is segmented by matching the longest dictionary entry at each position against CC-CEDICT; a different segmenter would give a slightly different total, which is why the method is stated rather than assumed.

11,168 distinct words is a vocabulary a committed learner can reach. The frequency curve is as steep as it is for characters: the 99 most common words account for half of all word tokens, and 1,900 words cover 90%.

The tail is long and mostly names. 2,579 words occur exactly once, 4,744 appear only in the Old Testament and 1,271 only in the New — so a reader who starts in the Gospels meets a smaller vocabulary than the whole-Bible figure suggests.

## Words needed to cover the text

| Share of word tokens | Most frequent words needed |
| --- | --- |
| 50% | 99 |
| 80% | 825 |
| 90% | 1,900 |
| 95% | 3,253 |
| 99% | 6,802 |


## Questions

**Why is the word count lower than a published English word count?**

English counts are usually of running words (about 780,000 for the King James Bible), not of distinct words. The comparable figure here is word tokens, not the vocabulary size.

**Where can I get these words as a deck?**

The site publishes 97 ready-made decks — by HSK level, by book and by topic — and each exports to Anki, Pleco, Quizlet or CSV with pinyin, meaning and real verses.

**How many of them are in the HSK lists?**

HSK 1-9 covers 77.5% of word tokens; the remaining 22.5% are unlevelled.

## 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.
- Built with https://chinese-bible.com