How Many Words

 How many words are there in this house, I wondered the other day, knowing that when I did a rough count of how many books and records there were I had been satisfied with very approximate answers.

Printed, hard copy words, many of which will be the same common ones.

There aren't 2000 books but there are a lot of magazines. 500 are poetry books but some of them are big anthologies.

There's hundreds of CDs, all of which have booklets or inserts.For the sake of a completely meaningless, vastly underestimated number, I'ne multiplied up some very rough estimates.

I chose Mansfield Park to be the sample novel and possibly stand for all books. It has 10 words per line, 40 lines per page and about 400 pages which makes 160000 words but it has a lengthy introduction. Given that's there are books like two Shorter OED's, The Bible is quoted at 773746 words, Complete Shakespeare, etc, a book is conservatively estimated at 250000 words and I'll pretend there are 2000 of them to make up for much underestimating elsewhere and say Books account for 500 million words.

A TLS seems to come in at 65000 and maybe there's 120 of them = 8 million

PNR we'll call 4 million.

Gramophone and the BBC Music magazine can be 8 million.

About Larkin might be 1.5 million

Other poetry magazines, old newspapers must be another couple of million.

So, periodicals 25 million

 

There are quite a few words in the booklets of hundreds of CDs. I have absolutely no idea. I'm already beyond caring. 2 million. 

The co-efficient of underestimation on a figure that has left out all kinds of things and taken no account of small print could easily take us well beyond a billion but any counting I did to achieve it was recondite because I've over-ruled it and recalibrated it at every stage but such numbers soon cease to mean anything.

It's just that I've been in houses that have hardly any books in them. Perhaps the people that live in them spend their lives living them rather than reading about things elsewhere.

 

If there are a thousand CDs in the house, a thousand hours of music only takes 42 days of playing them continuously to listen to them all. That sounds nowhere near enough but we are betting without the LPs and cassettes. But whereas just about all the recorded music in the house has been listened to, the percentage of all the words in the house that have been read would be alarmingly low.