How big is this?
People ask if the site is "an encyclopedia's worth." So here's the honest measure — no rounding up to sound bigger, no rounding down to sound humble. Just the count, and what it's worth next to books you already know.
What that's worth, honestly
- About three novels deep. An average novel runs ~85,000 words; this site is roughly three of them, back to back.
- Half of War and Peace (~560,000 words) — one of the longest novels in the language, and you're halfway up it.
- Past double a big nonfiction book. Most published nonfiction lands at 60,000–120,000 words. This clears the high end twice over.
- Not an encyclopedia — about a fifth of one volume. A full print Britannica set is ~44 million words (~1.4M per volume). "An encyclopedia" is a different order of magnitude, and saying otherwise would be a lie. But three books, solo, cited, and live? That's the real headline.
The one difference that matters
An encyclopedia asks you to trust it. This asks you to check it. Every one of those ~264,000 words carries a commit and a date in its footer, and the whole history lives on the Ledger. Size isn't the flex — checkable size is.
How it's counted: visible prose only — scripts, styles, and HTML tags stripped — across every .html page in the public site. The page count updates live from ledger.json; the word count is a dated snapshot (counted 2026-07-20) because tallying every page in your browser would be wasteful. One page is deliberately excluded: a11y.html is a machine-generated accessibility audit (~210,000 words of data, not writing) — counting it would inflate the number dishonestly. Comparison figures for novels and encyclopedias are widely-cited approximations, not exact. The method is in the page source; check the math. No lying.