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Beauty's ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death's pale flag is not advanced there.

      — Romeo and Juliet, Act V Scene 3

Shakespeare text statistics

Quick facts

  • The plays contain 34,896 total lines spoken by 1,221 characters.
  • There are 884,429 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.
   

Genres

Histories
290,923
(32.9%)

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Comedies
283,011
(32.0%)

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Tragedies
262,071
(29.6%)

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Poems
30,909
(3.5%)

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Sonnets
17,515
(2.0%)

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Words

Top 15 word forms,
by frequency of occurence

the     28,944
and     27,317
i     21,120
to     20,136
of     17,181
a     14,945
you     13,989
my     12,950
in     11,513
that     11,487
is     9,545
not     8,856
with     8,293
me     8,043
it     8,003

Go to the concordance

Characters

Top 15 characters,
by number of lines

Falstaff   471
Henry V   377
Hamlet   358
Duke of Gloucester   285
Othello   274
Iago   272
Antony   253
Richard III   246
Timon   210
Cleopatra   204
Rosalind   201
Vincentio   194
Brutus   194
Coriolanus   189
Lear   188

See all the characters

Plays

Longest plays,
by number of lines

Antony and Cleopatra

 

1,361

Othello

 

1,309

Troilus and Cressida

 

1,301

Hamlet

 

1,250

Coriolanus

 

1,240

Shortest plays,
by number of lines

Midsummer Night's Dream

 

605

King John

 

621

Richard II

 

636

Titus Andronicus

 

662

Comedy of Errors

 

664

List all plays by number of lines

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