Our data · Maude translation, Project Gutenberg
How many words is War and Peace?
566,513 words in Louise and Aylmer Maude's English translation, as published by Project Gutenberg, in 365 chapters. Another translation, or Tolstoy's Russian text, gives a different number.
Key points
- The longest part is Book Ten, with 65,137 words; the shortest is the Second Epilogue, with 17,635. A typical chapter is short: the median one has 1,422 words.
- The novel uses 17,996 different word forms. Half of them have appeared by the end of Book Three, 24% of the way through; each of the last five parts adds only about 300 new ones.
- The 5,218 most frequent forms make up 95% of the running words and the 9,279 most frequent make up 98%. These are forms, not the word families used in vocabulary research, and names count.
- Totals quoted elsewhere differ by a few thousand words because of the translation, the edition and the counting rule. Counting hyphenated words as one gives 564,777 for the same text.
| Words | 566,513 |
|---|---|
| Parts | 15 books, 2 epilogues |
| Chapters | 365 |
| Words in the median chapter | 1,422 |
| Different word forms | 17,996 |
| Forms used only once | 6,105 |
| Forms that cover 95% / 98% of the text | 5,218 / 9,279 |
| Reading time at 260 words per minute | about 36 hours |
How many words are in each book of War and Peace?
The fifteen books and two epilogues differ in length by more than three to one. Book Ten is the longest at 65,137 words; Books Thirteen and Fourteen are the shortest of the books proper, at about 20,000 each. Book One alone, 48,216 words, is about as long as the whole of The Great Gatsby (48,659).
| Part | Words | Chapters | Median chapter | Longest chapter | New | So far |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book One, 1805 | 48,216 | 28 | 1,621 | 3,616 | 5,194 | 5,261 |
| Book Two, 1805 | 40,702 | 21 | 1,976 | 3,306 | 2,409 | 7,670 |
| Book Three, 1805 | 44,329 | 19 | 2,178 | 3,439 | 1,439 | 9,109 |
| Book Four, 1806 | 23,621 | 16 | 1,260 | 2,908 | 663 | 9,772 |
| Book Five, 1806–07 | 33,794 | 22 | 1,502 | 3,157 | 1,150 | 10,922 |
| Book Six, 1808–10 | 33,540 | 26 | 1,230 | 2,229 | 896 | 11,818 |
| Book Seven, 1810–11 | 23,004 | 13 | 1,503 | 3,269 | 612 | 12,430 |
| Book Eight, 1811–12 | 31,176 | 22 | 1,350 | 2,084 | 572 | 13,002 |
| Book Nine, 1812 | 38,130 | 23 | 1,535 | 2,817 | 981 | 13,983 |
| Book Ten, 1812 | 65,137 | 39 | 1,501 | 4,038 | 1,210 | 15,193 |
| Book Eleven, 1812 | 52,217 | 34 | 1,378 | 3,832 | 857 | 16,050 |
| Book Twelve, 1812 | 24,466 | 16 | 1,516 | 2,199 | 303 | 16,353 |
| Book Thirteen, 1812 | 20,321 | 19 | 1,077 | 1,739 | 342 | 16,695 |
| Book Fourteen, 1812 | 20,692 | 19 | 1,086 | 1,780 | 330 | 17,025 |
| Book Fifteen, 1812–13 | 24,450 | 20 | 1,124 | 2,123 | 283 | 17,308 |
| First Epilogue, 1813–20 | 24,311 | 16 | 1,512 | 2,120 | 346 | 17,654 |
| Second Epilogue | 17,635 | 12 | 1,492 | 2,352 | 342 | 17,996 |
| Title and list of contents | 772 | |||||
| Whole book | 566,513 | 365 | 1,422 | 4,038 | 17,996 | |
Dates in the part names are those printed in this edition's headings. Download all 365 chapters as CSV (CC BY 4.0).
How many chapters does War and Peace have, and how long are they?
365 in this edition: between 12 and 39 in each part, the most in Book Ten. Tolstoy's chapters are short. The median chapter has 1,422 words, less than half the 3,100 of a typical chapter in the English novels on our novel lengths page, so the book is easier to read in short sittings than its total suggests. The longest chapter, chapter 4 of Book Ten, has 4,038 words; the shortest, chapter 22 of Book Five, only 148.
The division into fifteen books and two epilogues is that of this English edition. Russian editions, such as the 22-volume collected works of 1978–1985, group the same fifteen parts into four volumes, of three, five, three and four parts, followed by an epilogue in two parts (Tolstoy, 1978–1985), so you may see the novel described either way.
How many different words are in War and Peace?
17,996 different word forms, of which 6,105 appear only once. That is only about three times as many as The Great Gatsby (5,940) for a book more than eleven times as long: most of a long novel is the same words coming back. Over equal stretches of 5,000 running words, War and Peace uses 1,310 different forms and Gatsby 1,445, so page for page the Maude translation uses a plainer vocabulary than Fitzgerald.
New words arrive early. Book One introduces 5,194 forms, 29% of everything the novel uses. By the end of Book Three, 24% of the way through the text, half of all the forms have appeared. From Book Twelve on, each part adds only about 300 forms the reader has not met before in the book. For a learner this is the useful side of a very long book: once past the first few hundred pages, the vocabulary keeps repeating, and repeated words are the ones that stick when you learn words from reading. The same measure for 117 other books is on how many different words are in a book.
How many words do you need to know to read War and Peace?
The 5,218 most frequent forms in the novel make up 95% of its running words, and 9,279 make up 98%. The first 1,000 forms alone cover 80.6% of the text.
| If you know | Share of the text |
|---|---|
| The 1,000 most frequent forms | 80.6% |
| The 2,000 most frequent forms | 87.5% |
| The 3,000 most frequent forms | 91.0% |
| The 5,000 most frequent forms | 94.7% |
| To cover | Forms needed |
|---|---|
| 90% of the running words | 2,664 |
| 95% of the running words | 5,218 |
| 98% of the running words | 9,279 |
Read these numbers with two limits in mind. They assume you know exactly this book's most frequent forms, while a real learner's vocabulary comes from many sources, so the vocabulary you need in practice is larger. And they count forms, so walk and walked are two, and names such as Pierre and Natasha count like any other word. Research on reading counts word families instead: for an unsimplified English novel, Paul Nation estimates that knowing 98% of the running words takes about 8,000 to 9,000 word families, with names counted as known (Nation, 2006). What 95% and 98% mean for comprehension, and how many words you need for other goals, is on how many words you need in a foreign language.
Why do other word counts for War and Peace differ?
Three things change the total: the translation, the edition and the counting rule.
- Translation. Every English translation uses its own words, so each has its own total. Ours is the Maude translation only. We have not counted the Russian original, and a count in Russian would not be comparable with an English one.
- Edition. Standard Ebooks publishes the same Maude translation, with the Russian forms of names that the Maudes anglicised restored, and gives its length as 563,500 words (Standard Ebooks), about half a percent below our count of the Project Gutenberg edition. Our total also includes the list of contents printed in this edition (765 words).
- Counting rule. We count the parts of a hyphenated word, such as well-known, as separate words. Counting it as one gives 564,777; counting every group of characters between spaces, roughly what a word processor does, gives 563,428.
A difference of a few thousand words is therefore normal. A much larger one usually means another translation.
Where can you read War and Peace for free?
The edition we counted is ebook 2600 on Project Gutenberg, free to read online or download. Our chapter table lists every chapter with its words, different forms and new forms, so you can plan a reading schedule or pick a section to start with. For the length of other classics, translated and English, see how many words are in a novel.
How we counted
- Edition. The EPUB file without images of Project Gutenberg ebook 2600, fetched from Project Gutenberg's official mirror and processed in memory. Its metadata names Leo Tolstoy as author and Aylmer and Louise Maude as contributors. It is the same file as on our novel lengths page, and the totals agree.
- What counts as a word. A run of letters, lower-cased; an apostrophe inside a word keeps it one word (don't); hyphenated words count as separate words; numbers are not words. The Project Gutenberg header and licence are removed. The title, the author line and the list of contents stay in, because a reader of that edition meets them: 772 words in all.
- Books and chapters. A heading that starts with Book or Epilogue opens a part, and each Chapter heading inside it opens a chapter. Apart from the headings of the parts themselves, every word after the list of contents belongs to exactly one chapter.
- Different and new forms. A form is a distinct spelling, ignoring capitals, so walk and walked are two forms and names count. A form is new in a part or chapter if it has not appeared earlier in the book, the title and list of contents included.
- Coverage. Sort the novel's forms from most to least frequent and add up their occurrences until they reach 95% or 98% of the running words. The rules are the same as for our 117-book data.
- Reading time. Words divided by 260 words per minute, Brysbaert's (2019) estimate for adult native speakers reading fiction silently in English. People reading in a second language are usually slower.
References
- Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
- Nation, I. S. P. (2006). How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening? Canadian Modern Language Review, 63(1), 59–82. doi:10.3138/cmlr.63.1.59
- Tolstoy, L. War and Peace. Translated by Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude. Standard Ebooks. standardebooks.org/ebooks/leo-tolstoy/war-and-peace/louise-maude_aylmer-maude
- Tolstoy, L. N. (1978–1985). Sobranie sochinenii v 22 tomakh [Collected works in 22 volumes], vols. 4–7: Voina i mir. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura. rvb.ru/tolstoy
- Tolstoy, L. War and Peace. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. Project Gutenberg ebook 2600. gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600