32 Characters Appear in All 66 Books
Answering: “characters in every book of the Bible”
Updated 2026-09-26 · plain text · JSON
This is a smaller number than it sounds, and that is the interesting part: a book as short as 2 John runs to a few hundred characters, so a character has to be extremely common to appear in every single book. The 32 that manage it are the structural core of written Chinese — the copula, the commonest verbs, the particles that hold a sentence together.
As a study list it is the first thing to learn and the least satisfying, because most of these characters carry grammar rather than meaning. Their value is that they let you see where a sentence begins and ends.
For a list weighted by usefulness rather than ubiquity, the frequency ranking is better: the 73 most frequent characters cover half of all character occurrences in the Bible.
| # | Character | Occurrences | In all 66 books |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 的 | 48,163 | yes |
| 2 | 他 | 20,558 | yes |
| 3 | 你 | 19,893 | yes |
| 4 | 我 | 19,526 | yes |
| 5 | 们 | 19,087 | yes |
| 6 | 人 | 17,129 | yes |
| 7 | 在 | 13,045 | yes |
| 8 | 和 | 12,438 | no |
| 9 | 是 | 11,783 | yes |
| 10 | 耶 | 10,475 | no |
| 11 | 说 | 9,509 | no |
| 12 | 不 | 9,397 | yes |
| 13 | 要 | 8,319 | yes |
| 14 | 以 | 8,219 | no |
| 15 | 就 | 8,142 | yes |
| 16 | 有 | 8,107 | yes |
| 17 | 为 | 7,912 | yes |
| 18 | 了 | 7,886 | yes |
| 19 | 子 | 7,508 | no |
| 20 | 一 | 7,168 | yes |
Questions
- Why so few?
- Because the shortest books are very short. A character must appear in 2 John and 3 John — a few hundred characters each — as well as in Psalms.
- Are these the most frequent characters?
- Mostly, but the two lists differ: ubiquity across books and raw frequency are not the same measure, and the table shows both.
- Where can I practise them?
- Each character links to its own page with stroke order, a writing sheet and the verses it appears in.
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).