Kelhanion

Hi all,

It's still almost four hours until midnight and I don't feel like writing yet (all this life and energy around me, *hrrr*). That's why I got this strange urge to compare word lengths with you, my fellow writers.

I have one completed novel and one that is approximately 65% finished in my hard drive and I decided to compare the average length of words in the two (I used the built-in word count of Open Office). The completed novel had 484 966 characters and 63 168 words making it average of 7,677 characters per word. The other work was 250 427/32 898=7,612. Both of them were written in Finnish.

I find it kind of fascinating. There's lots and lots of words of course, but still it's kind of fun the averages are so close (7,612/7,677=0,9915).

I don't know how much the word count figures can be trusted (whether it includes spaces or not etc.), so for comparison: my only text written in English has 8118 chars, 1610 words and 5,042 characters/word.

I've always "known" that Finnish has longer words than English (in my case the difference is about 2,5 chars/word but I have an itch that the English average is higher). How is it with your writing? What does your Word say? I'd like to know similar figures about your work(s). Remember to say what language you write in.

Rob

I write in English. I haven't written anything particularly long, just some short stories. I picked 6 at random, and ran them through the stats in MS Word and got the following:

1. Length 2001 words, chars per word 4.2
2. Length 1454 words, chars per word 4.2
3. Length 2303 words, chars per word 4.2
4. Length 1542 words, chars per word 3.8
5. Length 1676 words, chars per word 4.0
6. Length 982 words, chars per word 4.0

I suspect this reflects my writing style, which is quite plain and simple, rather than a more flowery style some might use and which might give a greater number of characters per word.

I'd be interested to see what figures others get.

Cheers,
Omni