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By the numbers

Four billion words and a few numbers

On November 19, 2021, the English Wikipedia reached 4 billion words. These are spread across 6,410,341 articles, giving us an average of 624 words per article.

To celebrate this monumental achievement, I have copied two tables from Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia showing the number of words over time in the English Wikipedia, plus a table comparing the English Wikipedia to other language editions of Wikipedia, and a table comparing the English Wikipedia to the other English-language Wikimedia projects.

A brief history of Wikipedia's word count

The old Wikistats-1 has records of the total number of words in all articles every month from January 2001 to January 2010. Wikipedia underwent tremendous growth during that time, going from a mere 3000 words in January 2001 to 1.798 billion words in January 2010.

Unfortunately, there is no record of the number of words from January 2010 to December 2017; Wikistats-1 no longer includes the number of words after January 2010, and the Special:Statistics page only started showing the number of words in all content pages in December 2017. By January 2018, Wikipedia had over 3 billion words in all articles.

Yearly statistics

Copied from Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia#Yearly statistics

The table below shows the number of words in all articles; it does not include words in other namespaces like Talk, User, or Wikipedia.

Date  Word count   Increase during 
preceding year
 % Increase during 
preceding year
Average increase
per day during
preceding year
Average number
of words
per article
2002-01 4,800,000 4,800,000 13,151 267
2003-01 32,100,000 27,300,000 569% 74,795 309
2004-01 61,400,000 29,300,000 91% 80,279 315
2005-01 127,000,000 65,600,000 107% 179,726 288
2006-01 353,000,000 226,000,000 177% 619,178 403
2007-01 709,000,000 356,000,000 101% 967,123 473
2008-01 1,082,000,000 373,000,000 53% 1,021,918 515
2009-01 1,437,000,000 355,000,000 33% 972,603 553
2010-01 1,798,000,000 361,000,000 25% 989,041 599
2011 to 2017
2018-01-03 3,077,580,920 159,947,625A 8.9%B 438,213C 555
2019-01-17 3,302,922,240 225,341,320 7.3% 617,373 570
2020-01-01 3,497,842,238 194,919,998 5.9% 534,027 584
2021-01-01 3,755,065,625 257,223,387 7.3% 702,796 604
2021-12-01 4,007,118,847 252,053,222D 624
A Average increase per year from 2010 to 2018; total increase of 1,279,581,000 words over the same time period
B Average percent increase per year from 2010 to 2018; overall increase of 71% over the same time period
C Average increase per day from 2010 to 2018
D So far this year

Monthly statistics

Copied from Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia#Monthly statistics

The table below includes the total number of words in all articles and the number of words added at the start of each month since January 2020.

Date  Word count   Increase during 
preceding month
2020-01-01 3,497,842,238
2020-02-01 3,515,781,525 17,939,287
2020-03-01 3,533,853,569 18,072,044
2020-04-01 3,556,915,740 23,062,171
2020-05-01 3,584,029,618 27,113,878
2020-06-03 3,611,432,972 27,403,354
2020-07-01 3,631,265,076 19,832,104
2020-08-01 3,653,369,248 22,104,172
2020-09-01 3,673,339,409 19,970,161
2020-10-01 3,692,222,212 18,882,803
2020-11-01 3,713,395,900 21,173,688
2020-12-01 3,733,824,980 20,429,080
2021-01-01 3,755,065,625 21,240,645
2021-02-01 3,776,685,968 21,620,343
2021-03-01 3,811,006,931 34,320,963
2021-04-01 3,839,532,258 28,525,327
2021-05-01 3,889,436,965 49,904,707A
2021-06-01 3,901,873,166 12,436,201B
2021-07-01 3,910,030,230 8,157,064C
2021-08-01 3,928,967,545 18,937,315
2021-09-01 3,948,128,338 19,160,793
2021-10-01 3,967,621,552 19,493,214
2021-11-01 3,987,982,865 20,361,313
2021-12-01 4,007,118,847 19,135,982
A There was an unusually large increase in the number of words in April 2021 (49,904,707), followed by an unusually small increase in the number of words in May 2021 (12,436,201). Averaging the two gives 31,170,454.
B Of note, in May 2021 the number of words initially increased to about 3,915,000,000, then decreased to 3,901,873,166 by the end of the month. It is unclear whether this decrease was real or if the software was correcting for overcounting words the previous month.
C Like May 2021, June 2021 was associated with an unusually small increase in the number of words (8,157,064).

Other language editions of Wikipedia

These numbers are from the respective Special:Statistics page of each Wikipedia, as archived on November 19 or November 20. The Wikipedias are listed in order of total number of articles.

The total number of words and the average number of words per article do not take the differences between languages into account; for example, the numbers for the German Wikipedia are probably lower than expected because those absurdly long German compound nouns – or as the Germans say, Komposita – are counted as a single word.

Rank Language Article count Total number of words Average number of words per article
1 English 6,410,341 4,000,129,529 624
2 Cebuano 5,798,858 1,133,030,453 195
3 Swedish 2,869,907 554,187,156 193
4 German 2,633,928 1,371,867,034 521
5 French 2,375,039 1,455,423,310 613
6 Dutch 2,071,866 350,042,301 169
7 Russian 1,771,576 864,798,899 488
8 Spanish 1,732,337 1,004,609,868 580
9 Italian 1,726,906 809,795,169 469
10 Polish 1,497,172 428,331,733 286
11 Egyptian Arabic 1,379,812 263,860,931 191
12 Japanese 1,301,338 1,241,470,027 954
13 Vietnamese 1,270,100 296,895,040 234
14 Waray-Waray 1,265,577 148,504,147 117
15 Chinese 1,241,688 555,619,022 447
16 Arabic 1,143,857 383,567,056 335
17 Ukrainian 1,123,360 377,872,433 336
18 Portuguese 1,077,435 466,490,337 433

Other English-language Wikimedia projects

These numbers are from the respective Special:Statistics page of each Wikimedia project, as archived on November 19 or November 20. Please note that Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and Wikispecies are multilingual. The projects are listed in order of total number of words.

Rank Wikimedia project Content page count Total number of words Average number of words per content page
1 Wikidata 95,868,410 data items 10,730,523,694 112
2 English Wikipedia 6,410,341 articles 4,000,129,529 624
3 English Wikisource 907,771 content pages 919,463,608 1,013
4 English Wiktionary 6,852,872 entries 197,504,739 29
5 English Wikibooks 94,113 pages 91,884,915 976
6 Wikispecies 780,754 content pages 76,472,516 98
7 English Wikiquote 41,095 articles 65,301,248 1,589
8 English Wikiversity 28,908 content pages 42,217,582 1,460
9 English Wikivoyage 30,532 travel articles 40,981,686 1,342
10 Wikimedia Commons 76,699,658 pages 18,979,904 0.25A
11 English Wikinews 21,670 news articles 9,910,365 42

A Wikimedia Commons has an average of 0.25 words per page, which is probably an underestimate because almost all of the text is in template boxes and is ignored by the word-counting software. For example, see this Wikimedia Commons page for an image used in the ALS article.

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