NaNoWriMo :: NaNoWriMo Blog

Last week I asked Wrimos to cook up some perspective-bringing comparisons that could help us wrap our heads around this year's record-setting, pants-melting collective word count. I was hoping we'd hit 1.5 billion words, and we ended up clearing that by more than 100,000,000 words.

Here are some of your explanations of how best to understand 1.5 billion's majesty. Got some more calculations to add to this groundbreaking mathematical treatise? Add 'em in the comments! And thanks to Sarah Panian for all her compiling help!

1.5 billion words…

—Would lift 765 adults off the ground. Let's say each breath a person takes is made up of one half liter of air. And let's say that with each breath, a person can say ten words. By this count, 280 words can fit inside an average-sized (14-liter) party balloon. Mythbusters (love that show) found that it takes about 7,000 helium-filled balloons to lift a full-grown man off the ground. If people breathed helium, the breath it would take to say 1.5 billion words would fill enough balloons to lift 765 adults off the ground. To put it more poetically, though, that would be enough balloons to lift a man, a woman, a boy, and a girl off the ground from every single country in the world! (Whes)

—Would go around the earth about 2.104 times if each word was an egg and the eggs were lined up end to end. (bandie2010)

—Would take almost 2 years to watch and would stretch more than 70% of the Earth’s circumference if each word was written on a frame of 35mm movie film. 1.5 billion words would require 17,755 miles of film and playing at 24 frames per second. (kennlar)

—Would reach the bottom of Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench (the deepest part of the ocean) 1691 times if each of the 1.5 billion words was exactly 1/2 inch in length. And if each word weighed 1 ounce and were made of vegetation, there would enough food to keep about 312,500 adult elephants happy for one day. (griffin_fire777)

—Could go from Oakland to the North Pole, back to Oakland, and would nearly make it to the North Pole yet again. The average length of an English word is five characters. This works out to 1/4 of an inch in 12 point Times New Roman font. 1/4 of an inch per word times 1.5 billion words is 375 million inches. That's 31,250,000 feet, which works out to 5918.6 miles. Let's start in Oakland, CA. We start writing these 1.5 billion words right next to each other, and head north. We reach the (geographic) North Pole, turn around, and keep going. That's how far 1.5 billion really is. (Thunderlord)

—Could wrap about halfway around the earth, and almost twice around the moon when each word is stacked end to end! If the average length of a word in the English language is 4.5 letters, and the default typeface of our world is Times New Roman in 12 point, an average word would be about 2/5th of an inch long. Multiply that by 1.5 billion, and you get 600 million inches (50 million feet or 15,240,000 meters). And that's not even including people with large handwriting or who have a different typeset than the default. That amount of words is taller than the Burj Dubai, the world's tallest man made structure by 21552 times!

And length-wise, if you've written 50K, you've reached 1667 ft (that sounds a little familiar for some reason). Height-wise, 833 ft! Amazing. That's taller than the Empire state Building, all on your own. (Wowey)

—Could get you two and a half trips to the Earth's core... three-fourths around Earth's equator... three times (nearly) around the Moon's equator. Assuming average word length of 2 cm (12 point font), converting to meters and then kilometers, 1.5 billion words is only 30,000 km. If you printed all those words out (assuming standard US paper and double line spacing) and assumed 50,000 words = 175 pages each. You would need 5,250,000 pages. Assuming a ream is 500 sheets and each ream is 2 inches tall... 10,500 reams. 21,000 inches. One story equals 106.75 inches so the height of the paper would be: 197 stories tall. That’s a whole heck of a lot of trees. Better edit electronically first! (Apollo16)

—Could fill 2 DVDs worth of storage. The average number of characters in an English word is 5. Multiply that by 1.5 billion and we have 7.5 billion characters. It takes one byte to store one character on the computer. So that is 7.5 billion bytes. Simplifying that we get about 7 GB of storage. That works out to 2 DVDs worth of storage or 10 CDs or 5, 087 3.5" floppy disks. If you add an extra character per word for spaces and punctuation it's 8.4 GB. That's 2 DVDs, 12 CDs or 6,104 3.5" floppy disks. (jlwatt)

—Is enough to write the Magna Carta (2500 words) 600,000 times and enough to write the US Constitution (slightly over 4000 words) over 300,000 times and the UN charter (just shy of 7000) over 200,000 times. And the longest document I was able to find (you will LOVE this), the United States Tax Code (2.8million words in 2004) more than 500 times. (AdonisNimbus)

—Would be 6 million pages long! If a standard printed book has 250 words per page, a book with the words from all of us Nanoers would total 1.5 billion words. I did some research to find out the thickness of standard paper used in publishing books, and it is approximately .0048 inches/one sheet. So, six million pages would be 28,000 inches long, which is 2,400 feet, which is 800 yards or eight football fields long. So, the total thickness of 1.5 billion words printed would be the length of eight football fields. W-o-w! (LifeofaSpark)

—Would bring us back to 1960, if we could travel back in time a second for every word. If we could travel back a year for every word, complex organisms are just beginning to evolve. Michael Jackson's album Thriller, best selling album worldwide, sold 108 million copies. Sell every word written for NaNoWriMo and you'd sell almost 14 Thrillers. That is 5 words written for every person in the USA and 1.13 words written for every person in China. The addition of words to the world is 240 times the estimated addition of people to the world. (Prof.Becket)

—If each word spans 590 yards/1528 feet of course! Jupiter is 390,682,810 miles away (it varies greatly too).

—Would be three times the width of the Australian continent. I estimated the average word to be 5 characters long, and approximately 0.35 inches wide on my monitor here when typed out. Multiply by 1.5 billion and the word count stretches 8286 miles.
For a single insane person to type all 1.5 billion in one month, they would have to write at 2038333 words per hour, or 34722 words per minute, 24 hours a day for the entire 30 day period! At the aforementioned average of 5 characters per word (plus a space between them), this is equivalent to pressing a key once every 0.288 milliseconds. I would imagine one would wear out several keyboards in this endeavor. (jfarquhar)

—Would wrap around the equator about two and a half times (2.47 times, actually). Assuming that we're working with 12 pt Times New Roman, and the average word length is 5.2 characters, 1.5 billion words. If 1.5 billion words were printed out in manuscript form (1-inch margins, 12pt, double-spaced), you could lay the pages out end-to-end all the way from Brownsville, TX (the southernmost city in the state) to Kansas. Stacked up, these manuscripts would reach a height of 426 ft. All that paper would also weight as much as about 5 elephants, and that's not even counting the ink. 1.5 billion words would fill up 7,868 copies of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. And 5 elephants would definitely be enough to defeat a ninja. (Dracontiar)

—Would reach 15,000 kilometers (approx. 9,320 miles). With an average word length of 4.5 characters, (plus one space for each word, so we'll say 5), and a 12 point Garamond, which makes each word about 1cm long.

The current distance from the Earth to Jupiter is approximately 5.785 AU, which is about 865 million km. So our combined words would stretch 0.0000173 times the distance to Jupiter.
The weight of France is trickier, however if we instead use a 1:1 scale map of France, printed on the same paper as our NaNoNovels, we can turn it into a question of area. My 50,000 words are over 108 pages. That would mean 1.5 billion words would use 3,240,000 pages. The area of these, assuming they are, like mine A4, would cover about 202,000 square meters, so 0.2 square kilometers. France is about 675,000 square kilometers, meaning our NaNos are 0.0000003 times the size of France.

Research has shown that the average ninja has a chest size of 42 inches. Adding, say, an extra foot for each arm, that gives us 66 inches, which is about 170cm. Given our 15,000 km of words, we could wrap them around our ninja over 88 million times. I would say that this would probably be enough to subdue said ninja.

1.5 billion words is equivalent to:
1.8 million London buses
137 thousand American football fields
London to New York 3 times
The distance light travels in 0.05 seconds

—Will have gone through the Oxford English Dictionary 2433.1 times... IN A MONTH! According to the Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition, Volume 1. Oxford University Press, 1989), there are roughly 616,500 words in the English language.

The English translation of Tolstoy's War and Peace contains around 560,000 words. This means that the NaNoWriMo authors will have compiled collectively a word count equal to 2678.6 copies of War and Peace... IN A MONTH!

The longest novel in Latin or Cyrillic alphabets, according to Wikipedia, is a French novel entitled Artamène, by Madeleine and Georges de Scudéry, counting in at 2.1 million words. Upon hitting 1.5 billion words, we here at NaNoWriMo will have written the count of the longest recorded novel over again 714.3 times... IN A MONTH!

The Bible, both Old Testament and New combined, is comprised of 774,746 words. This means that at 1.5 billion words we will have written the complete span of the Bible 1936.1 times... IN A MONTH!
The word count of the complete Harry Potter books is 1,090,739. If you have them, go get them now and stack them up on your floor. At 1.5 billion words, here at NaNoWriMo we will have written 1,375.2 times the entire series... IN A MONTH! (Vampiryyn)

—Would carpet the entire area of Vatican City (the smallest state in the world). If we assume the average size of a word to be about 0.53 square inches in Times New Roman 34 point font, then 1.5 billion words = about 0.2 square miles.(Katiefish)

—Would be equivalent to writing 25% of the DNA inside one of our human cells (there is essentially 6 billion base pairs per cell). It took 13 years for the Human Genome Project to be completed (one of the goals being to sequence the DNA strand...essentially read it). NaNoWriMo wrote in one month what took science over 3 years to read for 25% of the DNA. (rmckinney)

—Would beat Chuck Norris. (mydoctorisbetter)