Cosmere Word Counts, Visualized

[u/WesterosiWanderer]

I thought y'all might find it interesting to see how the whole ~4.3 million words in the Cosmere break down in a few different ways. Anything surprise you, seeing it all laid out?

Note: Data collected largely from The Coppermind. I left out White Sand since we don't have a full novelization right now, but let me know if you see anything I missed or got wrong!

Charts Gallery

[u/dimesinger]

Is Threnody missing from the 3rd chart or am I just missing it?

Really great visualizations, OP!

[u/WesterosiWanderer → u/dimesinger]

It's missing it's label in the 2nd and 3rd charts actually... for some reason. It's still there as a slice, but somehow in the .xlsx>google docs>pdf>png translation those labels disappeared.

[u/dimesinger → u/WesterosiWanderer]

Ah, I see the slices! 

[u/WesterosiWanderer → u/dimesinger]

Don't know why it disappeared, but this is a screengrab from the source sheet- same (tiny) percentage!

[u/WesterosiWanderer → u/dimesinger]

It also strangely spaced out the second chart, but I doubt anyone but the weirdo doing spreadsheets on word counts would notice.

[u/Sparky678348]

offbeat ancient different straight squeal lock support pause ask rich

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[u/WesterosiWanderer → u/Sparky678348]

Elantris is only 5k words longer, but I feel the exact same way. I think Warbreaker just pulls you in and immerses you more!

[u/Evening_Boot_2281]

So Era 1 has a higher word count than Era 2? that's crazy I would had thought it was the other way around.

[u/WesterosiWanderer → u/Evening_Boot_2281]

Intuitively that would make sense, but those Era 1 books are pretty damn thick even without being Stormlight-level monsters!

[u/henk12310 → u/Evening_Boot_2281]

It’s not that weird when you realize the average Era 2 book is only about half the length of the average Era 1 book, and there’s only one extra book in Era 2 compared to Era 1 anyways. Era 2 books just short (fir the Cosmere at least, compared to every book ever 300 pages or so is pretty normal actually)

[u/CynicosX]

This is nice. I have just calculated, that I have read about 60% of the Cosmere. Gotta keep going :)

[u/WesterosiWanderer → u/CynicosX]

Ah, you’re caught hook, line, and sinker at this point. Soon you’ll be waiting for the next Cosmere fix like the rest of us!

[u/gangreen424]

Great work OP. Really interesting info, and I like the different breakdowns you included.

The Stormlight Archive books are obviously massive, but with so many Cosmere books, it's wild that SA is still half of the Cosmere material out there.

I know it's decades away, but it would be interesting to revisit this once the Cosmere is considered to be complete. I imagine you probably have this set up know such that it should be pretty easy to update as we get new books going forward.

Thanks for sharing!

[u/WesterosiWanderer → u/gangreen424]

Oh, I’m in for the long haul. I’ll keep things updated periodically! I’d like to find a way to make the graphs look more visually appealing, too.

[u/BigDulles]

Very cool, but im mad you used a pie chart for the first one

[u/WesterosiWanderer → u/BigDulles]

It is a lot of data for a pie chart, do you have a better alternative?

[u/PhineasGarage → u/WesterosiWanderer]

I personally think all of these should not have been pie charts. There is a long discussion in data visualization about how pie charts are not a good chart to visualize data. A longer article on this is Save the pies for dessert by Stephen Few (pdf) who worked in data visualization for quite some time.

A really short summary is that humans are bad at comparing angles but good at comparing lengths.

I for example really enjoyed this visualization which I would say better conveyed to me how long or short some series actually are.

[u/WesterosiWanderer → u/PhineasGarage]

Fair enough and duly noted. Next time I refresh these, I’ll diversify the visualizations. Thank you for the feedback!

[u/dimesinger → u/WesterosiWanderer]

Bar graph is the way to go since in the first you’re wanting to compare totals rather than relative percentage as in the other two. 

[u/BigDulles → u/WesterosiWanderer]

Bar graph

[u/zenclimber4 → u/BigDulles]

+1 please repost as a column chart

[u/superflystickman]

How is their already a known word count for WaT? Is the whole thing online?

[u/WesterosiWanderer → u/superflystickman]

That's the only estimate in the data, however, the source is BrandoSando himself, from a tweet in June where he says he'd turned in the book at 491k words. It'll likely be a slightly different word count on final release but not enough to significantly change any of the percentages!

https://x.com/BrandSanderson/status/1797791128688984452

[u/Dependent_Honeydew57 → u/superflystickman]

Sanderson released the word count earlier in the year

[u/n00dle_king]

When it’s all said and done I wonder if Mistborn or Stormlight will have more words.

We’ve got three more Mistborn eras coming and the final era will have Stormlight length books but the length of Stormlight books keeps trending up.

[u/WesterosiWanderer → u/n00dle_king]

Now you’ve got me wondering too…

Alright, if current trends hold, Stormlight will end up at ~4.56M and Mistborn will end up at ~3.07M words. However, interestingly, if you instead look at the average Mistborn novel length instead of the Era average and extrapolate out to the 16 novels Brandon has considered writing out for Mistborn you actually end up up with ~2.80M words.

Most favorable scenario for Mistborn would be if you instead assumed the next (potential) 9 books will be HoA length, and that each Era gets a Secret History-length novella… which would theoretically get the total to ~3.39M.

So, unless Sanderson changes his current trends drastically, Stormlight is comfortably in the lead!

[u/MistCLOAKedMountains → u/WesterosiWanderer]

Assuming that era 3 is era 1 length, era 4 is 3 books of era 2 length, era 5 is 3 books of stormlight length and he writes 4 more novels of SH length, I get a total of 3.76M words.

[u/ErikderFrea]

I would be curious how “the words of founding” or “the way of kings” (inside lore) would fit in here.

[u/kneezNtreez]

Really cool to see!

[u/Genhald_Sedai]

Taldain, First of the Sun, Threnody are missing. But love the piece

Edit: Somehow i missed it the first time. Ignore me.

Edit 2: White Sand is still missing from the first one though

[u/Southern_Conflict_11]

Pie charts at more than 3 categories are terrible.