# 4,744 Words Are Old Testament Only

> 4,744 of the 11,168 distinct words in the Chinese Union Version (和合本, simplified) occur only in the Old Testament, against 1,271 that occur only in the New.

Question: words only in the Old Testament
Answer: 4,744
Page: https://chinese-bible.com/en/reference/old-testament-only-words

The two halves of the Bible do not share a vocabulary. The Old Testament is four times the length and brings with it the words of sacrifice, kingship, tribal geography and law; the New Testament, shorter and later, adds a smaller set of its own.

For a learner the asymmetry is good news, because it makes the New Testament a much smaller vocabulary problem: 1,271 words that appear nowhere else, against 4,744 on the other side.

That is one reason reading plans start in the Gospels, and it is visible in the difficulty ranking too — the books with the highest share of elementary vocabulary are almost all in the New Testament.

The halves are not the same size either: 699,012 characters of Old Testament against 222,137 of New, which is most of why the two vocabulary counts differ by a factor of 3.7.

## The two testaments compared

| Part | Books | Characters | Verses | HSK 1-3 tokens |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Old Testament | 39 | 699,012 | 23,081 | 58% |
| New Testament | 27 | 222,137 | 7,940 | 65.2% |
| Words found only here | 4,744 (OT) | 1,271 (NT) | — | — |
| Shared vocabulary | 5,153 | — | — | — |


## Questions

**Which words are shared?**

5,153 words occur in both testaments — the common core of the text.

**Should I learn them separately?**

That is what the book decks do in effect: each is built from its own book's frequency list, so reading the Gospels never asks you to learn the vocabulary of Leviticus first.

**How is a word counted as belonging to one testament?**

By occurrence: a word counts as Old-Testament-only if every one of its occurrences is in the 39 Old Testament books.

## 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/).
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- 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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