what is the longest book or book with the most words?

Answer 1

The Oxford English Dictionary is the largest book in the world and DEFINITELY has the largest number of unique words. Just don't try lifting it yourself.

Answer 2

Depends on the kind of book but if you are excluding dictionaries and encylopeadias, the longest novel ever written in the English Language was Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady" - it racks up over a million words. As for encylopeadias, the Encylopeadia Brittanica is the largest.

Answer 3

Trinity is ALMOST correct, but you asked for the "book with the most words", and the Yongle Dadian is not written in words, it is written in 'characters'.

The longest book written in our system of 'words' is Henry Darger's "The Story of the Vivian Girls", a fantasy novel manuscript typed single-spaced with 15,145 pages in 10 volumes!

(Much longer than the "bible", which would not count anyway since it is a collection of books, not a single book!)

Answer 4

The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary should have all the words. It's a big book which weights 137 (Gosh, there's that number again) pounds.

Answer 5

Long long ago in a country far far away...
During the Ming Dynasty at least 3,000 scholars spent 4 years, beginning in 1403, to work on the Yongle Dadian, an encyclopedia with 11,095 volumes and 22,877 chapters.

There are an estimated 370 million Chinese characters used

Answer 6

United States Tax Code

Answer 7

War and Peace man, longest book i've ever seen and it's longer than the bible

Answer 8

Canterbury Tales by Chaucer.. took me realllllllllly long.. especially with the old english there, it was even longer.

Answer 9

why? you want to read it? what language? Check Guinness book of world records.

Answer 10

Henry Darger, The Story of the Vivian Girls

Illustrated fantasy novel manuscript typed single-spaced with 15,145 pages in 10 volumes. Discovered after Darger's death, the manuscript has never been published. The total number of words has been estimated; some believe this might be the longest novel ever written. [1] The most conservative guess will put this in the million-word realm, possibly into tens of millions.

Madeleine de Scudéry, Artamène

Published in ten volumes from 1649–53. It contains 2.1 million words[citation needed]. Available online (in French only) at Artamene.org.

Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu

Longest conventionally-read novel. 9,609,000 characters [2], nearly 1.5 million words. Holds the Guinness Book of Records title as Longest Novel. Published in 13 volumes from 1913 to 1927. English translation is titled Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time.

L. Ron Hubbard, Mission Earth

1.2 million words [3]. Published 1986 to 1988 as ten volumes.

Madison Cooper, Sironia, Texas

Published 1952. 1731 pages, originally published in two volumes. [4]Estimated at 1,100,000 words. [5]

Samuel Richardson, Clarissa

Published 1748. First edition contains about 969,000 words. Third edition contains some 5,500,000 characters, over one million words [6]. Published in nine volumes. Conventionally regarded as the longest novel in the English language.

Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time

Published from 1951 to 1975, as a partial tribute to Proust. Published in 12 volumes, it is sometimes regarded as a novel sequence. At over 1 million words, it is a contender for the longest English-language novel ever written.

Xavier Herbert, Poor Fellow My Country

Published 1975. At 1463 pages and 850,000 words, it is the longest Australian novel. [7]

Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

Published 1965. Contains "some 700,000 words on 1,198 closely printed pages". [8]

Courtney Thomas, Walls of Phantoms

Contains some 627,000 words. Not yet published. [verification needed]

Alexandre Dumas, Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, ou Dix ans plus tard

Written in 1847. When published in English it was usually split into three parts The Vicomte de Bragelonne, Louise de la Valliere and The Man in the Iron Mask. Estimated at some 626,000 French words. [9] [10] [11]

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Published in three parts, two in 1930, the third after Musil's death in 1941. Unfinished at over 1700 pages.

Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

Published 1993. 1488 pages softcover. 591,552 words. [12] The longest conventional novel in English since Clarissa.

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Published 1957. 565,223 words.[13] 1274 pages.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Published from 1865 to 1869. Original text has some 460,000 Russian and French words. English translation contains over 560,000 words and over 3.1 million characters; typically over 1400 pages as a paperback.

Carl Sandburg, Remembrance Rock

Published 1948. 532,030 words. [14]

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Published 1862. Nearly 513,000 French words. Unabridged French edition (ISBN 2070102645) 1779 pages (including essays).


language, like Chinese or Japanese, are more compact in their written forms than their Western counterparts. As such these works are often lengthier in translations even if their character spacing required are the same as when compared to Cyrillic or Latin alpabets.

Sohachi Yamaoka, Tokugawa Ieyasu

This 40-volume historical novel was serialized from 1950-67. The completed novel contains over 10 million Japanese characters. It is not just the longest novel in the Japanese language, but also one of the longest in any language.

Nakazato Kaizan: Daibosatsu Toge

Published in 41 volumes and 1533 chapters, this historical novel was the longest in the Japanese language until Tokugawa Ieyasu. 5.7 million Japanese characters. [18]

Li Guiyu: Dream of the Pomegranate Flowers

Completed 1841. 4,838,400 Chinese characters. [19] Written in recitative verse, this is the longest narrative in the Chinese language, four times longer than A Dream of the Red Chamber. Critics differ in opinion whether to classify it as a novel or narrative poem.

Yang Guofu, Chuangshi Qiyuan

Projected at 4.2 million Chinese characters, this novel is completed but has not yet been published in its entirety. Once publishing is complete, it would be the longest Chinese-language prose novel published. The first volume was published in 2005. [20]

Yao Xueyin, Li Zhicheng

This historical novel, completed in 1999, has the distinction of being the longest modern Chinese-language novel printed, at 3.4 million Chinese characters. It was published in 5 volumes over 40 years.

Vilasini, Avakasikal

Reputedly the longest novel in any Indian language, Avakasikal was written in Malayalam, in which it runs into 3,958 pages, four volumes and took 10 years to complete. [21]

Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber

Written in the 18th century. Currently published as a 120-chapter, five-book sequence, running over 2500 pages. [22] The incomplete English translation at Project Gutenberg contains over 440,000 words and over 2.4 million characters. At slightly over 1 million Chinese characters however, it is not even remotely the longest Chinese-language novel. (See above)

The 1999 Beijing edition (English translation) contains 4 volumes with a total of 2556 pages.