What does 1 million words look like?
Here is a 1 million words file using only Lorem Ipsum text :
It is always very hard to conceive very large numbers. Big amounts of time or space are subjective concepts. We don’t use rationality to get around their quantities, instead, we use feeling. We can feel how very tall a building is or how very large a lake can be.
A large quantity of words might be even tougher to surround in one’s mind. Let’s get beside those abstract ideas and let’s try to answer the following question : What does 1 million words really look like?
As a kid I’ve always asked myself how long it would take me to read 1 million words? How thick a book should be to gather all these characters into one single object. In this article I will try answering those childhood questions.
We will be using a Lorem Ipsum base text. Lorem Ipsum is a very famous latin piece of text used by designers as a placeholder text to fill design mockups. If you want to learn more about the origins of Lorem Ipsum you should dig into De finibus bonorum et malorum of Cicero.
Statistics generated by 1’000’000 words text.
The total version of the Lorem Ipsum text is 1’374 words long. In order to get to a million words it needs to be duplicated 727,80 times. Also for the experiment we will be using Arial, a font-size of 12 pts, and A4 sheets of paper. Here are the results :
Approximately 6’830’395 characters (with spaces) or 5’830’394 characters (no spaces)
Approximately 80’786 lines, on A4 paper using Arial 12.
Approximately 1’796 A4 pages or 1’120’165 cm2 of printed area using Arial 12.
Using Gutemberg’s Spine Width Calculator our 1’796 pages long book would have a spine width of 73 mm with a soft cover.
