Word count for entire NKJV
I'm trying to get a count of the total number of words in the NKJV. What's the easiest/quickest way to do that?
Thanks,
Mark
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No guarantee for accuracy but I love being a font of true trivia. From http://rti.myfineforum.org/archive/poll-selection-of-bible-verse-pop-up-translation__o_t__t_245.html
Bible Translation Word Counts
NASB and ESV are tied (recall I voted twice for the ESV during testing of the poll function).
I added the HCSB as an option to the poll in case anyone wants to vote for it.
Some might be interested to know a piece of trivia: that among the
popular English translations the HCSB uses the fewest words to translate
the original Greek and Hebrew into English.
The word count of the Hebrew and Greek text in the standard critical
editions is 545,202. A few word count stats on the English versions:
• Original KJV 774,746
• Current KJV 790,676 (Blayney 1769 version: 788,280)
• ESV 757,439
• NLT 747,891
• NIV 726,109
• HCSB 718,943
• NKJV 770,430
• NRSV 895,891
• NASB 782,815
• TNIV 723,393
Folks might consider Gordon Fee's paperback book published by Zondervan: How to Choose a Translation for All Its Worth: A Guide to Understanding and Using Bible Versions
Worth every penny of the less than $20 it costs.
My English favorites (in descending order): NASB95 tied with ESV (2007 text), HCSB, TNIV, NIV, KJV (Blayney version), NET, NLT (2008 version), NRSV, NKJV, JB, The Message, CEV
Some resources to dig deeper:
http://Bible-translation.110mb.com/Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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MJ,
Thanks for the reply and the shout-out for Gordon Fee. Anything he writes is awesome. However, I don't need to know the word count for the NKJV, I already found it using Accordance. I need to know HOW to do it in Logos. I'm stumped. Thanks in advance for any help that can be provided.
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Mark Allison said:
What's the easiest/quickest way to do that?
Sorry I misunderstood your request. I always think "use someone else's work" is the quickest way[:D]
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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The only accurate way is a Bible Search of Surface Text using the wildcard. It is also very long..
That's from my Desktop with i7 cpu and 7200 RPM HDD. The Laptop with i5 and SSD is slightly faster!
Ignore the highlighting as Logos restricts itself to 8 words/verse.
If you search "All bible text" in a Reverse Interlinear (or any bible with morphology) like NKJV, ESV you will get unwanted results from the underlying morphology. "Surface Text" is the 'manuscript' text.
EDIT: run overnight on "All Passages" for a one-shot count.
Dave
===Windows 11 & Android 13
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Wow! It took over a minute to find a word count in 2 John alone? It tok Accordance 3 seconds to find every word in the entire Bible!
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Mark Allison said:
Wow! It took over a minute to find a word count in 2 John alone? It tok Accordance 3 seconds to find every word in the entire Bible!
Logos have always been weak with "count the words" searches despite repeated requests over many years with Libronix and now, Logos 4. The major problem is organising the results in memory and pushing them through the video subsystem. I imagine Accordance uses a command that only returns the word count!?
Dave
===Windows 11 & Android 13
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Mark Allison said:
I'm trying to get a count of the total number of words in the NKJV. What's the easiest/quickest way to do that?
Export it in chunks and use Word's word count.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Accordance uses the same command as Logos and displays all the hit words in all the verses, just as Logos does. It does this on the fly as, I assume, Logos does. Took 2 seconds to search for, and display, every word in every verse of the NKJV using Accordance. That's why I assumed I was doing something wrong when attempting to perform the same search in Logos—I thought I had locked up my machine.
Mark
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Mark Allison said:
Accordance uses the same command as Logos and displays all the hit words in all the verses, just as Logos does. It does this on the fly as, I assume, Logos does. Took 2 seconds to search for, and display, every word in every verse of the NKJV using Accordance. That's why I assumed I was doing something wrong when attempting to perform the same search in Logos—I thought I had locked up my machine.
Mark
I'm pretty sure your problem is simply the speed, or should I say slowness, of Logos in its searches. For most things, it's not an issue. It might take a couple seconds to begin to search your library for a specific word and find the top and most useful hits. But for something like this, it has a bit of trouble. I don't know anything about computer software though, so I don't know why does Logos has such a hard time compared to other software. It would be nice if Logos 5 ends up all around faster when it comes out. Of course, Logos 4 is still great. Much better than doing everything by hand (I don't mean this facetiously). But it could definitely be faster and more efficient when it comes to a large number of things.
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Mark Allison said:
Accordance uses the same command as Logos and displays all the hit words in all the verses, just as Logos does. It does this on the fly as, I assume, Logos does. Took 2 seconds to search for, and display, every word in every verse
The point is that you don't see what's going on in the background. In reality, software is developed in order to avoid sequential searching of large amount of raw data. The software rather searches prepopulated index tables (thats why indexing takes so long and results in index files as big as the library itself). I don't believe Accordance really performed the search in the same way Logos did, but rather someone at Accordance envisioned that users might do such searches and put this into the index design (e.g. maybe there's a small table somewhere just giving the word count of all resources or resource chapters), whereas Logos didn't and thus really goes through the raw text data word by word.
I have seen some threads where seasoned Logos users rather tricked the search by adding the hits in the morphology tables (add the word count of all verbs, nouns, particles and other) rather than having the software go through determine the word count of "all".
Thus, no, Accordance doesn't do this on the fly. The massive difference in answer time therefore doesn't tell anything about the search performance of the two programs, but rather that they choose to pre-implement other kinds of index data.
Hope this helps.
Have joy in the Lord!
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No, Accordance doesn't have any pre-populated word count tables. You can perform a word search on any part or all of any resource (Church Fathers in Latin and/or Greek, Dead Sea Scrolls, Theological Journals, etc) and the speed is the same. It doesn't have to be a word search, any type of search involves the same speed.
Actually, you can check this for yourself. You can create your own Bible module (by downloading the text from CCEL for example) and instantly run a word search on the complete text. It will accurately find and display every word of the text, and give you a total number of hits.
Mark
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I can guarantee that if Logos5 solved the 'speed' problem, Logos4 would be looked on as the 'Vista' for Logos ... not ready for prime time but the right direction.
I think it's interesting that, if I understand Bob, 'search' is his cup of tea. His baby. In L4 the indexing solved one big problem (mucho resources) and also improved the algorithms. But it was overcome by WMF and the compromises associated with delivery.
I still remember a few weeks back when Bradley gave me the tip to click on the little colored boxes in the search panel to go to 'the right spot'. Shows how much I use L4's search results after almost 3 years. I do use the L4 search but go back to L3 to actually get the results. Faster.
"If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.
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DMB said:
I can guarantee that if Logos5 solved the 'speed' problem, Logos4 would be looked on as the 'Vista' for Logos ... not ready for prime time but the right direction.
I lol'ed.
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Dave Hooton said:
Logos have always been weak with "count the words" searches
Implementing "count the words" searches efficiently was not a design goal of the Logos 4 search engine. (Searching for a specific word, phrase, or Bible reference across dozens or hundreds of resources was. These are fundamentally two different approaches to searching that have different tradeoffs.)
You can try to "trick" the search engine to answer a problem it wasn't designed to solve by searching for "*", but you'll quickly discover that this is very slow (because it wasn't designed to solve that problem [:)]).
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The implication here is that it's an either/or situation. Accordance searches for words, verses and phrases across hundreds of resources even quicker than it performs a word search, which only takes seconds. So Logos appears to have made the decision that speed is not a priority for certain types of searches.
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I've read this thread, along with earlier ones on the same subject 'how many words'. I've always wondered why someone would want to know that. (not being negative; just wondering).
In the old days of manual copying and typewriters, word counts were a proof-check (in addition to fitting on a type-page; not the issue here). Even knowing the middle word is important if you're trying to find the missing or extra word. Similar to a binary search.
But in Logos in 2012? I suppose.
"If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.
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I'm editing a study Bible, updating it from the KJV to the NKJV. It has extensive summaries at the end of each book, and word counts are a part of that summary. I wanted the statistical summaries to be as accurate as possible, double-checking my figures from the results of more than one Bible software application.
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Mark Allison said:
The implication here is that it's an either/or situation.
There is some (limited) hope as a Syntax Search* in 2 Jn (Lexham SGNT) took 0.2s vs 68s. The entire SGNT took 11s for 138,020 words. The Cascadia SGNT takes the same time for 137,986 words.
I did the Andersen-Forbes Hebrew Phrase Marker Analysis in 4 ranges^ with a total 31s for 471,702 words. That should reflect the A-F Hebrew Bible.
* search a Word or Segment for # and tick "Match anything but this"!
^ a single pass took 87s for 471,702 words; the larger number of results choking the memory and video subsystems of my i7 Desktop.
Dave
===Windows 11 & Android 13
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DMB said:
I've read this thread, along with earlier ones on the same subject 'how many words'. I've always wondered why someone would want to know that. (not being negative; just wondering).
Doesn't the rabbis like to make theology out of what the middle letter/word/verse is?
Mac Pro (late 2013) OS 12.6.2
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I suppose, though I'm not sure how it would work given versional differences that today's non-rabbis are hard pressed to evaluate. Certainly as the translations moved in, it didn't appear to be too critical (Old greek, aramaic, etc).
"If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.
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fgh said:
theology out of what the middle letter/word/verse is?
Shall we use this as an opportunity to ask Logos to offer an academic papers library from which one can purchase individual articles? See An Analysis of the Priestly Blessing Using Gematria and Geometric Metaphor by Michael E. Brandt, Ph.D.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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If you've never seen the book "what in the world is the bible really about" you should check it out. There are so many great bible and trivia questions and so much helpful knowledge to questions like this, but there are roughly 775 thousand words in the bible
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