# Words per printed page: 1,989 books

How many words a printed page of a book holds, measured: the words counted in
the full text of 1,989 books, set against the median page count of
their 20,167 print editions.

- Study: https://readingrate.com/studies/words-per-page
- Data: https://readingrate.com/data/studies/words-per-page.csv
- Measured: 10 November 2026
- Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)
- Publisher: ReadingRate (https://readingrate.com)

## What it shows

A printed page holds about 300 words (the median). Half of the books
hold 250 to 347 words a page; one in ten fewer than 203 and one in ten
more than 402. Books of 280 to 320 pages (253 of them) hold
64,000 to 111,000 words (10th to 90th percentile).

## Columns

| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| slug | The book's address on readingrate.com: https://readingrate.com/books/<slug> |
| title | The title as ReadingRate catalogues it |
| author | The first credited author (translators left out) |
| words | Words counted in the book's stored full text |
| print_editions | Print editions with a page count between 40 and 3,000 (audiobooks and ebooks left out) |
| median_pages | The median page count of those editions |
| words_per_page | words divided by median_pages |

One row per book, sorted by title. UTF-8, comma-separated, with a header row.

## How it was measured

1. Words: every book whose full text ReadingRate stores with 10,000 words or
   more (2,890 books). Only texts that ReadingRate's identity check
   confirmed as the right book are kept (2,618); the others hold a
   different book, a translation or part of one.
2. Pages: the page counts of each book's print editions, most from Open
   Library. A book's page count is the median across its editions, so one
   abridgement or omnibus does not move it. 2,041 confirmed books have
   at least one print edition.
3. Books under 100 or over 800 words a page (52) are left out: their
   editions are almost certainly a different text from the one counted.

No figure is estimated. The only model involved is the identity check,
which reads a text and says which book it is.

## Known issues

- A stored text can include an editor's introduction or notes, which adds
  words. Checked against the counts usually published for 34 well-known
  books, 24 were within 5% and the median difference was 1%.
- Edition page counts mix trim sizes, large print, children's and annotated
  editions. The median softens this; a single row can still be off.
- The books are the ones whose text ReadingRate holds, which leans toward
  older books and classics in the public domain.
- Titles and authors are as catalogued and may differ from a given edition.

## Updates

Re-measured once a year from the same method; each release carries its
measurement date.

## Cite

ReadingRate, "How many words are on a page?", measured 10 November 2026,
https://readingrate.com/studies/words-per-page. Data under CC BY 4.0.