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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