---
title: "How many words are there in Chinese? Dictionaries, real text and the words you need"
description: "The largest new dictionary of modern Chinese has 157,000 entries; we met 95,316 different words in real Chinese text, and 684 of them make up half of every page. Most words are two characters long."
canonical: "https://mandarinthewild.com/guides/how-many-words-in-chinese"
published: "2026-10-27"
updated: "2026-10-27"
author: "Mandarin The Wild"
---

# How many words are there in Chinese?

More than any one person knows, and far more than you need: half of every page is 684 words.

By Mandarin The WildUpdated 27 October 20264 min read

We make Mandarin The Wild.

The short answer

Modern Chinese has well over 100,000 words: the largest new dictionary of it lists 157,000, and we met 95,316 different words in our count of real Chinese text. But they are very unevenly used. The commonest 684 words make up half of the words on a page, and nearly half of the 95,316 come up less than once in a million words. Most Chinese words are two characters long.

## What the dictionaries count

There is no single number, because a dictionary decides what a word is. The standard dictionary of modern Chinese, 《现代汉语词典》, lists over 69,000 entries in its latest edition. 《现代汉语大词典》, a five-volume dictionary of modern Chinese published in 2026, lists 157,000, with more than 400,000 examples.1 Our own dictionary, behind the word cards, has 107,196 headwords in simplified characters, not counting names.

Even native speakers don't agree where one word ends. When six native speakers marked the words in the same 100 sentences, any two of them agreed, on average, on only about three words in four.2 Is 打电话 (make a phone call) one word or two? Dictionaries, tests and people answer differently, which is why counts of Chinese words differ so much.

这个词语我在词典里查不到。

cíyǔ: “I can't find this word in the dictionary.”

词cí语yǔ

Noun

words and phrases; expression

Also written 詞語

## How many words real Chinese uses

A dictionary lists what could be said. To see what is, we cut Chinese web pages and our own collection of subtitles, chat, posts, stories and news into words and counted each one, keeping only words that came up at least three times.3 That left 95,316 different Chinese words, names included. A count of Chinese film and TV subtitles found a similar number, 99,121 different words in 33.5 million.4

Few of them do most of the work:

| Share of the words on a page | Different words it takes, commonest first |
| --- | --- |
| 50% | 684 |
| 80% | 6,452 |
| 90% | 16,523 |
| 95% | 31,045 |
| 98% | 51,490 |

At the other end, 45,417 words, nearly half of the 95,316, come up less than once in a million words. Those are the words of one field, one place or one story: you meet them when you read about it, and rarely otherwise. How many of the commonest words you need to read comfortably is its own question, with its own answer: [how many words you need to read Chinese](https://mandarinthewild.com/guides/how-many-words-to-read-chinese).

## How long a Chinese word is

Most Chinese words have two characters, but the words you read most have one:

| Characters in the word | Share of different words | Share of the words on a page |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | 7% | 45% |
| 2 | 60% | 49% |
| 3 | 18% | 4% |
| 4 | 12% | 1.5% |
| 5 or more | 3% | 0.2% |

Single-character words such as 的, 是, 我 and 有 are only 7% of the different words but 45% of everything on a page. Two-character words are both the biggest group and the other half of the page. A word on a page is 1.62 characters long on average. Four-character words, many of them [chengyu](https://mandarinthewild.com/guides/how-common-are-chengyu), are 12% of the words but 1.5% of the page.

## How many words HSK teaches

The 2025 HSK list, for all nine levels, has 10,855 words.5 They are mostly the right ones: 892 of the 1,000 commonest words in our count are on it, and HSK words make up 74% of the words on a page. Further down, the list and real text part ways: of the 10,000 commonest words, 6,004 are on it. The rest are names, spoken words and the words of particular topics, which you learn by reading about them. [How much Chinese each HSK level covers](https://mandarinthewild.com/guides/how-much-chinese-does-hsk-cover) breaks this down level by level.

## What this means for learners

- **Don't aim for the dictionary.** No reader knows 157,000 words, and nobody needs to: the commonest few thousand cover most of a page.
- **Learn the common one-character words first.** One-character words are 7% of the vocabulary but nearly half of everything you read.
- **Learn two-character words as words.** They are 60% of the vocabulary, and their meaning isn't always the sum of their characters: 东西 is "stuff", not "east west".
- **Meet the rare words in context.** Half the vocabulary turns up less than once in a million words, so it is learned by reading, not from lists. In [the Library](https://mandarinthewild.com/library), and on any web page with [Mandarin The Wild](https://mandarinthewild.com/extension), every word explains itself under your pointer, and the ones you save come back in Review.

## How we counted

The words are our language pack's word counts: the Mandarin part of FineWeb-2 and the training part of our text supply, which holds subtitles, chat, posts and comments, stories, news and other writing we collect to test our reader. Both are cut into words by the engine behind our word cards and weighted 60% web, 40% text supply.3 Only words written entirely in Chinese characters count, so numbers and Latin letters are left out; a word had to come up at least three times. Word length is counted in characters. HSK words are the 2025 list's 10,855, all nine levels.

## Questions

### How many words are there in Chinese?

Well over 100,000. The largest new dictionary of modern Chinese, 《现代汉语大词典》, lists 157,000 entries, and we met 95,316 different words in real Chinese text.

### How many words does a Chinese speaker use?

Far fewer than the dictionary holds. In our count, 684 words make up half of the words on a page and about 6,500 make up 80%; nearly half of all words come up less than once in a million.

### How many characters are in a Chinese word?

Usually two: 60% of different Chinese words have two characters. On a page, one-character words such as 的 and 是 are 45% of the words, and the average word is 1.62 characters long.

### How many words are in HSK?

The 2025 HSK list has 10,855 words across all nine levels. 892 of the 1,000 commonest words in real Chinese text are on it.

## Sources

Checked on 27 October 2026. Prices and features change; tell us if one has.

1. [新华网 (2026), 《现代汉语大词典》: 15.7万条 entries and 40余万 examples; the latest 《现代汉语词典》 6.9万余条](https://www.news.cn/politics/20260724/89b4f7dfe9614acf95b4b5f8226e3f1c/c.html)
2. [Sproat, Shih, Gale and Chang (1996), A stochastic finite-state word-segmentation algorithm for Chinese, Computational Linguistics 22(3)](https://aclanthology.org/J96-3004/)
3. [FineWeb-2, the web text we counted (its Mandarin part, cmn_Hani)](https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-2)
4. [Cai and Brysbaert (2010), SUBTLEX-CH: Chinese word and character frequencies based on film subtitles, PLoS ONE 5(6)](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010729)
5. [HSK: the official site of the Chinese Proficiency Test](https://www.chinesetest.cn/)

## Keep exploring

- [Guide词汇How many words to read Chinese](https://mandarinthewild.com/guides/how-many-words-to-read-chinese)
- [Guide听懂How much Chinese each HSK level covers](https://mandarinthewild.com/guides/how-much-chinese-does-hsk-cover)
- [Guide成语How common are chengyu?](https://mandarinthewild.com/guides/how-common-are-chengyu)

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