Update: How Many Words did Winston Churchill Produce?
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: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963: 5,200,000
The Second World War: 1,600,000 (not counting appendices)
The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill: 860,000
The World Crisis: 824,000
Marlborough: His Life and Times: 779,000 (not counting appendices)
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: 510,000 (not counting appendices)
Lord Randolph Churchill: 278,000
The River War: 200,000
*Total word count for the twenty-three volumes is 15.3 million; we estimate 10 million are WSC’s own words.
Word count: speeches
To be precise you’d have to count (I won’t!) the speeches listed in the Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963. Rough estimate: there are forty speeches per page of contents, about eight contents pages per volume, and eight volumes. So, at a guess, 2500 speeches.
But the Complete Speeches are not complete. Try to find his famous Durban speech after escaping from the Boers in 1899, for example. And some are only excerpts—as from his lecture tours of North America. Also, you must deduct notes by editors. But let’s add say 10% for missing speeches and guess that he made about 3000 in all.
The 5.2 million-word Complete Speeches, at eight volumes, is the longest book-length “work by Churchill.” Subtract 100,000 words of introductions and add missing speeches or verbiage. Let’s estimate six million words of speeches alone.
Official Biography
Some readers also ask about word counts for the Official Biography. The total for the eight biographic volumes is over 3,000,000 words. The twenty-three Companion or Document Volumes add 15.3 million, for a grand total of over 18 million words (80+ megabytes). Of course, these include many million words not by Churchill.
Someone once told Sir Martin Gilbert, “You’ve only published one-tenth of Churchill’s story!” Sir Martin replied: “Really? That much?”
Digital capacity
This doesn’t impress software engineers, but it does me: A single, old fashioned 250 gigabyte hard drive disk would hold over 1800 copies of all Churchill’s words and all the words in the Official Biography.
A modern hard drive holds about 3 terrabytes (3000 gigabytes). Therefore, your personal computer could house about 200,000 copies of Churchill’s works and the Official Biography.
What would Sir Winston Churchill make of this? No one can say, except to remember one of his maxims: “Words are the only things that last forever.”
5 thoughts on “Update: How Many Words did Winston Churchill Produce?”
Why is it so difficult to find the answer to approximately how may words were in Winston Churchill’s vocabulary.
He is considered as one of the greatest orators ever, yet I am unable to find any reference to the extent of Winston Churchill’s vocabulary.
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I think the answer is that nobody has tried. Hillsdale College has amassed digitally his total published production (twenty million words), so it must be theoretically possible for a software engineer to judge how many words were individual. I’ll ask. Still, that would not include quotations in the sixty million words published by his colleagues, contemporaries and numerous historians. And as Sir Martin Gilbert always said, we have but a fraction. Just think of how many of his private utterances were never recorded. -RML
Thank you so much. Indeed it was I, in my energetic Churchillian youth, when I pursued several lost causes (a big one in particular). Not a lost cause was discovering a stash of leftover sheets for the Collected Works at Hartnoll’s bindery in Cornwall. They did exquisite work, mainly Bibles. I had them bind several dozen sets, some vellum but more in morocco. To this day the morocco bindings fall open like well oiled door hinges, and the leather is still aromatic.
But certain individual cloth bindings, like the one you describe, were the work of my late friend and bookseller colleague Mark Weber. His binding of the Early Speeches made the rare and expensive original texts available again at modest prices. So Mark gets the credit for that one.
You encourage me to republish an old article, “The Sordid History of the Collected Works,” which is not entirely a pleasant story. It will be coming up soon on this website. For the nonce, my Connoisseur’s Guide is available through Amazon. It contains much of the Collected Works story—toward the back of the book (A279 in the Cohen Bibliography).
I believe I have you to thank for my later copy of Mr Brodrick’s Army and For Free Trade. I have a lovely gilt topped, burgundy cloth bound single volume entitled Mr Brodrick’s Army and Other Early Speeches, seemingly bound from leftover sheets of the 1974 Collected Works. It also includes Liberalism and the Social Problem, The People’s Rights and India. In James Muller’s excellent Foreword to your Connoisseur’s Guide to the Books of Sir Winston Churchill, he mentions you were responsible for recovering these leftovers. For that, and so much more, THANK YOU!
Thanks, Andrew, but the grand-daddy of all collections is Ron Cohen’s, much of which is now with the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, where my books and papers will all go as well. But most collectors would say the most elusive Churchill books of all are Mr. Brodrick’s Army (1903) and For Free Trade (1906)—cheap paperback collections of speeches, probably from a vanity press, which command stupendous prices. Even Ron managed to find only one of these. Fortunately they were replicated in the 1970s and these facsimile editions are commonly available.
The ‘Author photo’ is quite something Richard. Wow! It certainly looks like you assembled all his words; at least three times over! I wonder, was there ever a particular edition or dust jacket that forever and frustratingly eluded you?