I saw a couple of posts going viral on Reddit about the number of words in each European country’s Wikipedia page and figured I should jump in on behalf of the United States.
Below, I broke down the counties in the United States in two ways:
- Total word count by county
- Word count per capita by county
Word count per capita by county is interesting because it stops essentially being a population heat map of the United States. There’s a surprising amount written about some little counties like Loving County, Texas, population 83.
I did not include the reference section on Wikipedia since that seemed irrelevant to the article’s word count.
Number Of Words In Each County’s Wikipedia Article
The 10 Counties With The Most Words In Wikipedia
- New York County, New York – 33,797 words
- San Francisco County, California – 29,360 words
- Orleans Parish, Louisiana – 27,133 words
- Queens County, New York – 25,066 words
- Door County, Wisconsin – 24,665 words
- Bronx County, New York – 23,501 words
- Denver County, Colorado – 21,200 words
- Orange County, California – 20,882 words
- Richmond city, Virginia – 20,605 words
- Brevard County, Florida – 20,161 words
Number Of Words Per Capita In Each County’s Wikipedia Article
The 10 Counties With The Most Words Per Capita In Wikipedia
- Loving County, Texas – 4,487.95 words per capita
- Kalawao County, Hawaii – 4,337.5 words per capita
- Kenedy County, Texas – 1,493.49 words per capita
- King County, Texas – 1,265.5 words per capita
- Yakutat City and Borough, Alaska – 718.68 words per capita
- Petroleum County, Montana – 566.13 words per capita
- Blaine County, Nebraska – 456.36 words per capita
- Daggett County, Utah – 440.6 words per capita
- Banner County, Nebraska – 438.02 words per capita
- Arthur County, Nebraska – 407.42 words per capita
And u/deadflashlights, I hope this adds some value for you.
Methodology: How I Found The Word Counts For Each County On Wikipedia
Starting from a database of every county listed in the most recent American Community Survey, I used Saturday Night Science to scrape each Wikipedia article.
I then ran a simple word count on the resulting articles using every blank space as a proxy for a word. I made note not to include the reference section at the bottom of the article.
To calculate the words per capita, I divided the word counts by the population from the Census data. Finally, I broke the two resulting statistics, total word count and word count per capita, into deciles and mapped them.
Note, I multiplied the words per capita by 100 for the map, so it’s showing “Words Per 100 Residents,” but is mathematically the same for scale purposes.
Data is available upon request.
For more reading, check out:
- Cheapest States In America
- Richest States In America
- Most Dangerous States In America
- Worst Places To Live In America
- Worst Mid-Sized Cities
- Best Places By State
