According to Amazon’s great Text Stats feature, the median length for all books is about 64,000 words. The figure was found through looking at a number of books’ text stats, until "Brave New World"‘s 64,531 word count landed in the exact center of all books–50% of books have fewer words and 50% of books have more words.
PWxyz isn’t sure how useful this information is, but because we secretly like math, we’re all for injecting objective truths into subjective fields like literature. (Which is why things like this happen.) But it is nice to know, when you pick up a book and feel its weight, where it stands in relation to all others.
Anyway, here’s a sampling of classics and where their word counts land them on the spectrum. Click on the title to view all the statistical viscera.
29,966 words (75% of books have more words)
30,191 words (75% of books have more words)
46,573 words (64% of books have more words)
47,192 words (64% of books have more words)
53,510 words (58% of books have more words)
62,481 words (51% of books have more words)
64,531 words (50% of books have more words)
70,570 words (45% of books have more words)
78,535 words (41% of books have more words)
112,473 words (21% of books have more words)
117,963 words (18% of books have more words)
159, 344 words (9% of books have more words)
209,117 words (4% of books have more words)
226,741 words (3% of books have more words)
262,869 words (2% of books have more words)
310,593 words (2% of books have more words)
544,406 words (0% of books have more words)
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