How many characters are in Esther in Chinese?

5,858 Chinese characters in total, written with 724 distinct characters, across 165 verses and 10 chapters.

What HSK level do I need to read Esther?

56% of its word tokens are HSK 1-3 and 70.5% are within HSK 1-6; the remaining 24.4% are outside the HSK lists altogether, mostly names.

How long does Esther take to read in Chinese?

About 23 minutes at 260 characters a minute — a fluent pace, so expect two to four times that while learning.

Is Esther a good book to start with?

Not the gentlest: it ranks 53 of 66 by vocabulary. John and Matthew are easier by this measure.

Esther in Chinese: 724 Characters

Answering: “how many characters in Esther in Chinese”

Updated 2026-09-26 · plain text · JSON

Esther is set in the Persian court, where a Jewish queen intervenes to save her people. It is one of two biblical books that never mention God by name.

Every figure below is counted from the 和合本 (Chinese Union Version), simplified script text of Esther on this site: characters from the simplified text, words from its segmentation, HSK levels from the word lists. The difficulty rank compares this book with the other 65 by the share of word tokens at HSK 1-3.

Esther in numbers

Measure	Value
Chapters	10
Verses	165
Chinese characters	5,858
Distinct characters	724
Word tokens	4,131
Distinct words	906
Average verse	36 characters
HSK 1-3 word tokens	56%
HSK 1-6 word tokens	70.5%
Not in HSK 1-9	24.4%
Difficulty rank	53 of 66 (1 = easiest)
Reading time	23 min at 260 chars/min
Testament	Old Testament

The words Esther uses most

#	Word	Occurrences in this book
1	王	171
2	人	98
3	末底改	61
4	犹大	59
5	以斯帖	56
6	哈曼	53
7	说	46
8	各	39
9	王后	33
10	省	28
11	日	26
12	亚哈随鲁	24
13	事	22
14	要	22
15	城	20
16	必	20
17	见	20
18	书珊	19
19	就是	19
20	给	18

Function words excluded. Each word has its own page with pinyin, stroke order and the verses it appears in.

Words that occur in Esther and nowhere else in the Bible

Words
印度瓦实提以斯帖籍贯提列亚甲族哈哈曼爵位王国十三日盖印朝门细利斯废除保护性吉日普珥日

17 found, capped at 40 per book.

The easiest chapters of Esther

Chapter	HSK 1-3	Verses	Characters
Esther 10	60.9%	3	102
Esther 6	60.8%	14	490
Esther 5	59.4%	14	483
Esther 2	56.8%	23	846
Esther 4	56.6%	17	556
Esther 7	56.1%	10	385
Esther 9	56%	32	1,011
Esther 1	55.1%	21	727

Read it

Esther in the parallel reader — Chinese, pinyin and your own language side by side. Or take its vocabulary deck first, ordered by how often each word occurs in this book.

Questions

How many characters are in Esther in Chinese?: 5,858 Chinese characters in total, written with 724 distinct characters, across 165 verses and 10 chapters.
What HSK level do I need to read Esther?: 56% of its word tokens are HSK 1-3 and 70.5% are within HSK 1-6; the remaining 24.4% are outside the HSK lists altogether, mostly names.
How long does Esther take to read in Chinese?: About 23 minutes at 260 characters a minute — a fluent pace, so expect two to four times that while learning.
Is Esther a good book to start with?: Not the gentlest: it ranks 53 of 66 by vocabulary. John and Matthew are easier by this measure.

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: 2026-09-26, 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).