# 64.8% of Bible Words Are One Character

> 64.8% of the word tokens in the Chinese Union Version (和合本, simplified) are single characters and 32.4% are two characters long — but the two-character words outnumber the one-character words as vocabulary.

Question: how long are Chinese Bible words
Answer: 64.8%
Page: https://chinese-bible.com/en/reference/word-length-in-the-chinese-bible

Chinese is written without spaces, so word length only exists once the text is segmented. Segmented as described below, the Bible's words split cleanly: 2,336 distinct single-character words account for 64.8% of everything on the page, while 8,269 distinct two-character words account for 32.4%.

That inversion is the interesting part. Most of the *vocabulary* is two characters long — 3.5 times as many distinct words as the single-character set — but most of the *text* is single characters, because the shortest words are the grammatical ones that repeat endlessly.

Longer words exist and are worth knowing about: 563 distinct words run to three characters or more, largely transliterated names and set phrases. The longest entries reach six characters. For a learner the lesson is that two-character words are where the meaning lives, which is also how the decks on this site are weighted.

## Words by length

| Characters | Distinct words | Occurrences | Share of the text |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | 2,336 | 429,944 | 64.8% |
| 2 | 8,269 | 214,830 | 32.4% |
| 3 | 338 | 15,007 | 2.3% |
| 4 | 217 | 3,958 | 0.6% |
| 5 | 7 | 130 | 0% |
| 6 | 1 | 7 | 0% |

Reduplicated words such as 谢谢 are counted as two characters; there are 80 of them.

## Questions

**Does a different segmenter change this?**

Yes, at the margin: forward maximum matching against CC-CEDICT (this site's own segmentation) favours the longest dictionary match, which produces more two-character words than a segmenter that splits aggressively.

**Which single characters are the most common?**

的 他 你 我 们 人 在 和 — mostly particles and pronouns.

**How many words are there in total?**

11,168 distinct words across 663,876 tokens.

## 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