Isaiah's Words Unlock 89% of the Bible
Answering: “which Bible book teaches the most vocabulary”
Updated 2026-09-26 · plain text · JSON
Every book of the Bible shares most of its vocabulary with the rest, so "which book should I learn from" has a measurable answer: for each book, take its distinct words, and count what share of all 650,628 word tokens in the Bible those words account for. A big book with ordinary prose wins; a short book with specialised vocabulary does not.
The top of the table is Isaiah (3,788 words → 89%), Jeremiah (3,177 words → 88.4%), Psalms (3,469 words → 87.3%). The floor is higher than expected: even 2 John, with only 137 distinct words, covers 40.6% — because the commonest words are everywhere.
Stacking books is where it gets useful. Adding the book that raises coverage most at each step gives Isaiah → Luke → 1 Chronicles → Psalms: 6,554 distinct words for 96.7% of the entire Bible. That is a concrete vocabulary target — 55.8% of the 11,739 words the full text uses, for almost all of what it says.
| Step | Add | Vocabulary so far | Covers of the whole Bible |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Isaiah | 3,788 | 89% |
| 2 | Luke | 4,962 | 93.4% |
| 3 | 1 Chronicles | 5,705 | 95.6% |
| 4 | Psalms | 6,554 | 96.7% |
| 5 | Genesis | 7,108 | 97.4% |
| 6 | Ezekiel | 7,577 | 97.9% |
Greedy selection: at each step, the book whose vocabulary raises whole-Bible token coverage the most.
Questions
- Is this the same as the easiest book?
- No. John is the easiest to read by HSK vocabulary, while Isaiah teaches the most that transfers elsewhere. Easy and useful are different measures, and both are published.
- What about the Gospels?
- Their combined 3,971 words cover 88.7% of the whole Bible and 95.6% of the New Testament — the usual place to start, and a defensible one.
- Can I get one of these as a deck?
- Every book has a deck ordered by frequency inside that book, exportable to Anki, Pleco, Quizlet or CSV.
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).