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2023–2026 · The Quantified Corpus
Compiled June 14, 2026

The Corpus Report

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

WORDS WRITTEN
523,302
across 250 entries
HOURS OF READING
47
2,804 minutes, cover to cover
ENTRIES PUBLISHED
250
103 editions · 147 essays
TERMS DEFINED
1,941
in The Lexicon
DISTINCT WORDS
21,949
the working vocabulary
LINKS CURATED
1,499
over 75 weeks
YEARS ON RECORD
Four
2023–2026
AVERAGE ENTRY
2,093
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
2,093
words
MEDIAN ENTRY
2,136
words
LONGEST
7,686
Not Just Another Essay About DeepSeek—Th
NEWSLETTERS vs ESSAYS · words
NEWSLETTERS171,033ESSAYS352,269
Newsletters 33% · essays 67% of the 523,302-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 47 hours — a work-week of reading. Most single entries ask for far less.

TOTAL
47
hours, end to end
AVERAGE ENTRY
11
minutes
LONGEST READ
46
minutes
ENTRIES BY READING TIME · minutes
71–3174–6747–1012811–152416+
READING MINUTES ADDED PER YEAR
144231,055241,2172538826
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
1,941
from 74 editions
PER EDITION
32
on average
DENSEST EDITION
45
defined terms
CATEGORIES
Five
fields of knowledge
THE LEXICON BY CATEGORY
TECHNOLOGIES585CONCEPTS577TECHNICAL TERMS541ACRONYMS229PEOPLE & WORKS9
NEW TERMS FIRST DEFINED, BY QUARTER
8324Q14424Q232325Q136825Q233825Q334225Q436426Q17926Q2
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
203
in 2+ editions (10%)
LOAD-BEARING
62
terms in 3+ editions
OUTBOUND LINKS
1,499
over 75 weeks
PER WEEK
20
links curated
MOST-CONNECTED TERMS · appearances across editions
AI53QUANTUM COMPUTING15CEO10LLM10MIT103D9DARPA9VC8CYBERSECURITY7DIGITAL PRIVACY7VPN6BBC5
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
2023202418251526
AVG WORD LENGTH · letters
5.4235.6245.9255.526
VOCABULARY RICHNESS · TTR %
4623502452255126

Across 2023–2026 the average sentence tightened from 20 to 15 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 250 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 1,941 terms harvested from every edition's “The Less You Know” across 74 editions. The link graph counts 1,499 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 June 14, 2026.