Churchill Collected Essays Archives

Update: How Many Words did Winston Churchill Produce?

26 February 2020 Comments 4 Comments

How many words, how many speeches?

“How many speeches did Churchill make, and in how many words? Also, how many words did he write in his books and articles? [Updated from 2014.]

Word counts

Through the wonders of computer science (Ian Langworth and the Hillsdale College Churchill Project), we know that the present corpus of works by and about Winston S. Churchill exceeds 80 million words (380 megabytes). This includes 20 million (120 megabytes) by Churchill himself (counting his letters, memos and papers in the 23 volumes of Churchill Documents. Here are his the top word counts among his books:

The Churchill Documents: 10,000,000*

Winston S.…

Churchill’s Collected Works

11 March 2009 Comments 6 Comments

In the 1990s I found and began binding several hundred remaining sheets in leather as well as vellum, but those too are now out of sight. Also, the general editor of the series, the late Fred Woods, edited many of the texts (making changes discussed in detail in the Connoisseur's Guide), which makes them useless as a source of Churchill's original words. The great advantage of the enterprise was the four-volume Collected Essays, the only collection of Churchill’s periodical articles (other than those reprinted in his books) ever published in volume form, with a fine introduction by the late Michael Wolff.