How Many Words Are There In 1 GB?
Working out what a gigabyte of plain encyclopedia text actually holds.
Approximately one gigabyte of uncompressed plain english UTF-8 text holds in the region of 170 million words. Compression changes the picture sharply: ordinary prose typically shrinks to a quarter of its size or less, so the same gigabyte can carry well over half a billion words once packed.
Wikipedia measured in gigabytes
Applying the same arithmetic to the encyclopedia itself gives a sense of scale. The article text alone — no images, no revision history, no discussion pages — is a far smaller figure than most people expect.
| What is being counted | Approximate size |
|---|---|
| Current article text only, uncompressed | ~26 GB |
| The same text, compressed for download | ~24 GB |
| Every article, with all past revisions | ~26 TB |
| Images and media on Wikimedia Commons | ~500 TB |
Put the other way round: a single gigabyte would hold something close to a twenty-fifth of the written encyclopedia, and none of its pictures. The entire text of every English article would fit comfortably on an ordinary memory stick, while the media alone would need a rack of drives.