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An ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine own.

      — As You Like It, Act V Scene 4

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Shakespeare text statistics

Quick facts

  • The plays contain 34,895 total speeches spoken by 1,223 characters.
  • There are 884,421 total words in Shakespeare's 43 works.
  • There are 28,829 unique word forms, and 12,493 occur only once.
  • Those unique words account for 43.3% of total word forms.
  • The top 10 most frequently occuring words make up 21.4% of all words.
  • The top 100 most frequently occuring words make up 53.9% of all words.
  • The top 1% most frequently occuring words make up 66.7% of all words.

Word count by genre

Tragedies
289,628 words
(32.7% of total)

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Comedies
283,011 words
(32.0% of total)

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Histories
263,358 words
(29.8% of total)

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Poems
30,909 words
(3.5% of total)

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Sonnets
17,515 words
(2.0% of total)

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Most-searched keywords

Searches Keyword
139,813 1
132,360 love
90,877 hate
71,205 blood
56,365 I
39,264 be
38,976 is
35,258 night
33,343 death
32,855 -1'
32,428 you
30,836 sleep
30,444 my
27,161 time
24,189 loved

See the top 500 keywords

Most-searched works

Searches Work
446,888 Macbeth
409,764 Hamlet
343,682 Romeo and Juliet
255,718 Othello
221,445 King Lear
160,971 Antony and Cleopatra
160,595 Twelfth Night
157,719 Henry V
157,152 Midsummer Night's Dream
151,414 Henry IV, Part I
146,422 Cymbeline
144,567 As You Like It
143,835 Coriolanus
139,825 All's Well That Ends Well
137,067 Henry IV, Part II

See the full list

Word frequency

Top 15 word forms,
by frequency of occurence

28,944 the
27,317 and
21,120 i
20,136 to
17,181 of
14,945 a
13,989 you
12,949 my
11,513 in
11,488 that
9,545 is
8,855 not
8,293 with
8,043 me
8,003 it

Find a word in the concordance

Biggest roles

Top 15 characters,
by number of speeches

471 Falstaff
409 Richard III (Duke of Gloucester)
377 Henry V
358 Hamlet
274 Othello
272 Iago
253 Antony
210 Timon
204 Cleopatra
201 Rosalind
194 Brutus
194 Vincentio
189 Coriolanus
188 Lear
183 Henry VI

See all the characters

Play lengths

Most speeches

1,361

Antony and Cleopatra

1,309

Othello

1,301

Troilus and Cressida

1,250

Hamlet

1,240

Coriolanus

Fewest speeches

605

Midsummer Night's Dream

621

King John

636

Richard II

662

Titus Andronicus

664

Comedy of Errors

See all plays by number of speeches

Average speech length

Number of words per speech

35.26 Richard II
33.45 King John
31.33 Titus Andronicus
31.26 Henry VIII
30.62 Henry V
30.61 Winter's Tale
29.49 Merchant of Venice
28.16 Cymbeline
27.80 Henry IV, Part I
27.62 Henry VI, Part II
27.45 Henry VI, Part I
27.29 Midsummer Night's Dream
26.03 Henry IV, Part II
25.60 Henry VI, Part III
24.87 As You Like It

See average speech lengths for all plays

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