In the course of researching a column for KMWorld:

The Encyclopedia Britannica has about 65,000 topics spread across 32 volumes, for a total of 44,000,000 words. Average size of a topic: 676 words. [source]

Wikipedia has over 500,000 topics in English. Average length (using year-old figures): 294 .

BTW, I may have found an error in Wikipedia’s Britannica entry. It currently says: “As of 2004, the most complete version of Encyclopædia Britannica contains about 120,000 articles, with 44 million words.” That page count refers to the online version, but I think the word count applies to the print version. I haven’t found a word count for the online version.

I haven’t corrected the Wikipedia article because I haven’t found a source that really clarifies this. Besides, I’ve never gotten a fact right. [Technorati tag: wikipedia]

Categories: Uncategorized dw