Every now and then I post an update about how many words there are on this Blog. The last such piece was in January 2018, when the word count for all Blog Posts and Menu Items had just passed 300,000. Thanks to some additions made yesterday to this piece about ITV quiz show “Tenable”, the word count for all Blog Posts here on The Compartments has just passed 500,000. There are also over 40,000 words in Menu Items, over half of them added since last autumn. Most of them are contained in the lists of songs that were “Stuck at 2”. Compiling these lists (and documenting entire series of “Tenable”) has taken longer than it would take to write the equivalent amount of words as prose, so it seems valid to include all of that text as part of my word count.

The January 2018 Post referenced above included a link to another Blog, Indefeasible. It compares the total number of words in a range of classic novels, noting that there are 587,287 in Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”. I am still short of that figure by 44,000 words or so. My calculations at the start of last year suggested that I would reach it in February 2020, over six months from now.

Or maybe, depending on how you calculate these things, I am there already. I noticed some time ago that there is a discrepancy between how words are counted in Microsoft Word (where most of these pieces are drafted) and in WordPress (where they are published). The former includes numbers in its word count but the latter does not. This piece about Pop Master (which includes a lot of numbers) shows as 2,174 words in Microsoft Word and as 772 in WordPress. All of my calculations so far have been based on the WordPress figures. If I went back and recalculated to use Microsoft’s word count it might show that I have surpassed Tolstoy’s 587,287 already. Either way, it felt like this milestone (passing 500,000 words in 709 Blog Posts to date) was worth mentioning.