Four billion words and a few numbers

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	159,947,625^A	8.9%^B	438,213^C	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	252,053,222^D	—	—	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	49,904,707^A
2021-06-01	3,901,873,166	12,436,201^B
2021-07-01	3,910,030,230	8,157,064^C
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	0.25^A
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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