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2023–2026 · The Quantified Corpus
Compiled July 16, 2026

The Corpus Report

A record of the writing — every word, edition, and idea counted, from 2023 to today.

WORDS WRITTEN
588,830
across 268 entries
HOURS OF READING
51
3,080 minutes, cover to cover
ENTRIES PUBLISHED
268
109 editions · 159 essays
TERMS DEFINED
1,922
in The Lexicon
DISTINCT WORDS
23,462
the working vocabulary
LINKS CURATED
1,500
over 75 weeks
YEARS ON RECORD
Four
2023–2026
AVERAGE ENTRY
2,197
words
LONGEST ENTRY
7,686
words, single piece
01 · Volume

Word Count

A record of consumption — what the corpus is made of, and when it arrived.

AVERAGE ENTRY
2,197
words
MEDIAN ENTRY
2,181
words
LONGEST
7,686
Not Just Another Essay About DeepSeek—Th
NEWSLETTERS vs ESSAYS · words
NEWSLETTERS188,457ESSAYS400,373
Newsletters 32% · essays 68% of the 588,830-word corpus.
WORDS PUBLISHED PER MONTH — NEWSLETTERS (ORANGE) vs ESSAYS (TEAL)
2023202420252026 PEAK · 2026 JAN
Each band is words shipped that month; the curves track the publication's two voices.
02 · Attention

Read Time

At a steady pace the whole corpus is 51 hours — a work-week of reading. Most single entries ask for far less.

TOTAL
51
hours, end to end
AVERAGE ENTRY
11
minutes
LONGEST READ
46
minutes
ENTRIES BY READING TIME · minutes
71–3174–6747–1013911–153116+
READING MINUTES ADDED PER YEAR
144231,055241,2172566426
03 · Density

The Lexicon

The corpus distilled. Every edition mints vocabulary; the rate of coinage marks when the field — and the writing — accelerated.

TERMS DEFINED
1,922
from 73 editions
PER EDITION
32
on average
DENSEST EDITION
45
defined terms
CATEGORIES
Five
fields of knowledge
THE LEXICON BY CATEGORY
TECHNOLOGIES602CONCEPTS559TECHNICAL TERMS510ACRONYMS242PEOPLE & WORKS9
NEW TERMS FIRST DEFINED, BY QUARTER
123Q317724Q14224Q232225Q136525Q224225Q334525Q434326Q18526Q2
Each column counts terms making their first appearance — the corpus's rate of new ideas.
04 · The Graph

Interconnectedness

Ideas don't live in one edition. Terms recur, binding issues into a web — and a curated trail of outside reading anchors it to the wider world.

RECURRING TERMS
220
in 2+ editions (11%)
LOAD-BEARING
65
terms in 3+ editions
OUTBOUND LINKS
1,500
over 75 weeks
PER WEEK
20
links curated
MOST-CONNECTED TERMS · appearances across editions
AI56QUANTUM COMPUTING14CEO10DARPA10LLM10MIT103D9VC8CYBERSECURITY6DIGITAL PRIVACY6VPN6VR6
The concepts that thread through the most issues are the corpus's load-bearing ideas.
05 · Evolution

Progress in Style

Measured year over year within this window, the prose tightened even as the ideas thickened — leaner sentences carrying a denser, richer vocabulary.

AVG SENTENCE LENGTH · words
2023202418251426
AVG WORD LENGTH · letters
5.4235.6245.9255.426
VOCABULARY RICHNESS · TTR %
4623502452255126

Across 2023–2026 the average sentence tightened from 20 to 14 words, while vocabulary richness climbed from 46% toward a high of 52% — leaner prose carrying denser ideas. Richness is measured on length-normalised 1,000-word windows, comparable across years of very different size.

Methodology & Scope

This report covers 268 entries published from 2023 onward; earlier writing (2013–2022) is documented in a separate supplement. Word counts tokenise the plain-text body of each post; reading time is Ghost's own estimate. Lexicon figures cover 1,922 terms harvested from every edition's “The Less You Know” across 73 editions. The link graph counts 1,500 curated outbound references logged over 75 weeks. Set in the Token Wisdom house style — Libre Caslon numerals on warm paper, with the burnt-orange accent. Compiled July 16, 2026.