Confessional trivia

[Ploutos]

Shockingly, a Google search for word counts for our Reformed confessional standards came up short, but it was relatively easy to find texts of the standards without footnote markers or cross-references inserted; so with a bit of copying and pasting, I was able to get a rough estimate.

Westminster Confession of Faith (1788): ~11,900 words
Comparable in length to the book of Job or the gospel of Mark

Westminster Larger Catechism: ~15,500 words
Comparable in length to the books of Joshua or Judges or the gospel of John

Westminster Shorter Catechism: ~4,200 words
Comparable in length to Ecclesiastes, Hosea, or 2 Corinthians

Belgic Confession: ~9,200 words
Comparable in length to Nehemiah, Proverbs, Daniel, or Revelation

Heidelberg Catechism: ~8,100 words
Comparable in length to Nehemiah or Romans

Canons of Dordt: ~12,000 words
Comparable in length to the book of Job or the gospel of Mark

Second Helvetic Confession: ~33,500 words
Comparable in length to Genesis, Psalms, or Jeremiah (the 3 longest books of the Bible by word count)

I am not aiming for scientific precision here - just for a rough idea. Word counts are pulled from WordCounter. Bible book word counts are pulled from Overviewbible.

 

[Ploutos]

This morning I ran some calculations using the Average Sentence Length Calculator.

The Belgic Confession features sentences averaging ~35 words in length.

The Westminster Confession of Faith features sentences averaging ~53 words in length.

The Westminster Larger Catechism features sentences averaging ~37 words in length. However, this was done without filtering the questions out, and each question counts as a sentence. I imagine that without the questions, the average sentence length would be somewhere between 60 and 70 words.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism features sentences averaging ~19-20 words in length. Again, with the questions filtered out, I imagine the average would go up somewhat, to somewhere around 25-30 words.

The Heidelberg Catechism was the one that required the most searching to find an online version of it uncluttered by footnote markings or verse references after each question. Because the questions are marked as "Q1, Q2", etc., I had to copy and paste into a blank document and do a find-and-replace to eliminate the Qs. The sentence calculator was marking each one as a question because of the "Q". The sentence calculator calculates 21 words per sentence, but this webpage breaks some of the answers up into multiple sentences in a way that I haven't seen done elsewhere. I think the actual average should be a fair bit longer - my offhand estimate would be somewhere around ~40-50 words per sentence.

For the Canons of Dort, an average sentence length of ~27 words is given.

For the Second Helvetic Confession, an average sentence length of 21 words is given. I believe this is probably skewed by the headings and would be a bit longer if calculated properly.

 

[Ploutos]

Turning to the Fleisch-Kincaid readability score, which I really only know from my encounters with WordPerfect and KJV-onlyists... again, the aim here is curiosity and overall impression rather than scientific precision.

I found it surprising that the WCF would rank as more difficult to read than the WLC. My personal impression on reading them was the reverse - that the WLC is denser and requires more mental processing power than the other. I also found it odd that the Heidelberg would rank as easier than the WSC; but again, this may be a result of the particular link that I copied from, as it appears to introduce sentence breaks into the answers of the Heidelberg that aren't found in other sources.

In my own personal evaluation, I would rank these confessional standards as follows, from easiest reading to most difficult reading: WSC, BC, HC, 2HC, WCF, WLC, CoD. That is purely subjective, with no objective criteria going into the ranking - just my own impressions and recollections from reading them.

Belgic Confession
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 11.3
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 61.5
Reading Level: 8th & 9th grade ( Plain English )
Average Words per Sentence: 26.5
Average Syllables per Word: 1.4
Sentences: 356
Words: 9436

Westminster Confession of Faith
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 15.1
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 46
Reading Level: College ( Difficult to read )
Average Words per Sentence: 33.4
Average Syllables per Word: 1.5
Sentences: 356
Words: 11901

Westminster Larger Catechism
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 12.1
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 54.1
Reading Level: 10th to 12th grade ( Fairly difficult to read )
Average Words per Sentence: 25.5
Average Syllables per Word: 1.5
Sentences: 612
Words: 15597

Westminster Shorter Catechism
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 7.2
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 66.6
Reading Level: 8th & 9th grade ( Plain English )
Average Words per Sentence: 13.1
Average Syllables per Word: 1.5
Sentences: 325
Words: 4254

Heidelberg Catechism
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 6.9
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 72.8
Reading Level: 7th grade ( Fairly easy to read )
Average Words per Sentence: 15.4
Average Syllables per Word: 1.4
Sentences: 527
Words: 8103

Canons of Dort
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 12.3
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 53.4
Reading Level: 10th to 12th grade ( Fairly difficult to read )
Average Words per Sentence: 26.1
Average Syllables per Word: 1.5
Sentences: 469
Words: 12219

Second Helvetic Confession
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 8.2
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 69.5
Reading Level: 8th & 9th grade ( Plain English )
Average Words per Sentence: 18.6
Average Syllables per Word: 1.4
Sentences: 1832
Words: 34099

 

[No Other Name]

This is pretty neat. Heh, I am kind of curious to see what the scores would be for Berkhof, Turretin, Muller et al. That'd be a fun breakdown haha

 

[Ploutos]

This is pretty neat. Heh, I am kind of curious to see what the scores would be for Berkhof, Turretin, Muller et al. That'd be a fun breakdown haha

Well, if you can find the text in a form that can be copied and pasted, it can be done!

 

[J.L. Allen]

Turning to the Fleisch-Kincaid readability score, which I really only know from my encounters with WordPerfect and KJV-onlyists... again, the aim here is curiosity and overall impression rather than scientific precision.

As a KJV-mostlyist, I appreciate what you're doing here.

 

[Ploutos]

As a KJV-mostlyist, I appreciate what you're doing here.

I'm mostly grateful for the kind words!

 

[Stargazer65]

I feel totally edified by this information!

 

[Ploutos]

Within a couple years of its initial publication in 1563, the Heidelberg Catechism had been translated into Latin and Dutch. It was translated into Polish and Hungarian in 1577, and into Greek (!) in 1597. Source

The Westminster Confession, by contrast, has been much less frequently translated so far as I can tell. It was translated into Latin in 1656 (unable to cite a source at this moment) and there is an Arabic translation of it available online. I don't read or speak Arabic, so I have no idea how to evaluate this. A Spanish version is available (also, this version by Ligonier, which does a lot of great work making Reformed theology accessible to the Spanish-speaking world). Ligonier has also translated it into French. It seems that these translations are newer, and aside from the Latin translation, I'm not seeing any indication that the Westminster Standards spread outside the English-speaking world early on. Perhaps someone more informed on the matter can weigh in.

More translations of the WCF from Ligonier: Portuguese; Korean.

A translation into Hebrew from the FPCoS.

 

[CathH]

Just geekery, but I wonder if there is a comparable readability score for the original languages of the non-English ones ... just wondering if the fact that the Heidelberg etc have been translated into English would bump their score upwards compared to 1640s English (depending when the translations were done for whatever you fed into the tool!) I would have probably estimated that the WCF would be more dense than the WLC though.

 

[Ploutos]

Just geekery, but I wonder if there is a comparable readability score for the original languages of the non-English ones ... just wondering if the fact that the Heidelberg etc have been translated into English would bump their score upwards compared to 1640s English (depending when the translations were done for whatever you fed into the tool!) I would have probably estimated that the WCF would be more dense than the WLC though.

Those are good questions.

My next thing, when I have a couple of minutes, is to see if there's a tool for calculating the average length of a word, and for determining the number of unique words in a passage. I'd be interested to see the statistics for those things with these confessional documents.

 

[Ploutos]

This morning, I turned to the Average Word Length Calculator for some more statistical fun. Again, these are just straight copy-paste jobs. I've found texts without prooftexts inserted, because footnotes and Scripture references would really throw off the word counts. From the site:

Comparing Average Word Length Across Genres & Audiences​

Different types of writing have distinct average word lengths. Here’s a quick comparison:

Children’s books	3.5 – 4.2
General web content	4.7 – 5.5
Business writing	5.0 – 5.8
Academic articles	6.0 – 6.8
Legal/technical documents	6.5+

[th]Genre/Audience[/th][th]Typical Avg. Word Length[/th]

The Belgic Confession is here listed as 9,465 words (using the same text from above in this thread), 51,346 characters, and 41,978 characters without spaces: an average word length of 4.29 letters. The longest word length is 16 letters; unfortunately, word length is given in graph form, which causes some weird browser behavior when trying to display the stats for such a large chunk of text. I therefore couldn't get a read of just how many 16-letter words there were, but it was quite a bit more than just 1 or 2, I think.

For the Westminster Confession of Faith: 11,938 words; 68,120 characters; 56,216 characters without spaces; average word length of 4.56 letters. There might be just 1 or 2 words each of 16, 17, and 18 letters long, and a handful of 14- and 15-letter words.

The Westminster Larger Catechism comes up with 15,681 words; 90,070 characters; 74,279 characters without spaces; and an average word length of 4.56 letters. There are a couple of 15- and 16-letter words.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism contains 4,300 words, with 24,090 characters and 19,732 non-space characters. The average word length is 4.40 letters. There is a small sprinkling of 13- and 14-letter words and a slightly larger smattering of 12-letter words.

The Heidelberg Catechism registers at 8,107 words; 43,263 characters; 35,157 characters without spaces; and an average word length of 4.20 letters. There are a couple of 14-letter words, and by visual estimation more 12- and 13-letter words than the WSC.

For the Canons of Dort: 12,322 words; 68,511 characters; 56,193 non-space characters; and average word length of 4.39 letters. It contains a very small number of 15- and 16-letter words.

For the Second Helvetic Confession, the word length calculator shows a small number of 15-, 17-, and 18-letter words, but no 16-letter words. The average word length is given as 4.31 letters over 34,104 words, with 187,168 characters and 153,096 non-space characters.

I am aware that if you subtract the number of words from the number of total characters, you don't always arrive at the number of non-space characters. The math doesn't math. As mentioned before in this thread, the goal here is general estimates, not scientific precision. It was interesting to see that by and large, all of the documents are roughly equivalent in terms of word length, with the WCF and WLC leading by a slight margin and the BC, 2HC, and HC trailing by similarly slight margins. The WSC and the CoD are right in the middle. Again, though, I don't know that the differences here are substantive enough to explain any perceived differences in readability and style. Sentence length does more to explain those perceptions. The CoD is FAR drier reading than the WSC in my opinion, yet the average word length is almost exactly the same.

 

[Ploutos]

Turning to the Online Unique Words Calculator, I find that the Belgic Confession has 1,775 unique words. "God" is used 109 times; "Christ" 70 times; "holy" 60 times; "Jesus" 41 times; "church" 38 times.

The Heidelberg Catechism has 1,307 unique words, but it looks like it counts the question numbers as a word, so taking that out would bring the total down to 1,178. "God" shows up 134 times, "Christ" 81 times, "holy" at 44, "life" at 41, and "spirit" at 39.

 

[DrJack]

How about some real fun? What is the average word length per sentence in Paul's epistles? I am assuming he (well, he did have a pretty amazing Editor) is the G.O.A.T. in the vernacular of our day! I sure wish I knew this back in the day when I was told I wrote overly long & complex sentences! "Hey teacher, you think I have run-on sentences? Ever heard of the Apostle Paul?"

 

[davejonescue]

This is pretty neat. Heh, I am kind of curious to see what the scores would be for Berkhof, Turretin, Muller et al. That'd be a fun breakdown haha

Berkhof - Systematic Theology - Part 1 - I. The Existence of God.

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 10.9
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 51.8
Reading Level: 10th to 12th grade ( Fairly difficult to read )
Average Words per Sentence: 19.4
Average Syllables per Word: 1.6
Sentences: 273
Words: 5284

Turretin - Elenctic Theology - 5th T. Creation. Q. 1-5.

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 9
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 62.1
Reading Level: 8th & 9th grade ( Plain English )
Average Words per Sentence: 17.6
Average Syllables per Word: 1.5
Sentences: 541
Words: 9520


Muller - PRRD - B.2, P.2, Ch. 3

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 11.1
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 51.1
Reading Level: 10th to 12th grade ( Fairly difficult to read )
Average Words per Sentence: 20.1
Average Syllables per Word: 1.6
Sentences: 885
Words: 17823

 

[MW]

I once had a discussion with pedagogue about readability scores and he called it an "administrative tool for bureaucrats."

 

[Ploutos]

I once had a discussion with pedagogue about readability scores and he called it an "administrative tool for bureaucrats."

Bureaucrats and KJV-onlyists.

I don't place any serious stock in these tools as scientifically determinative, but it is an interesting way to gain some broad insights into the technical features of our confessional standards. It also makes for some fun trivia facts to use at parties - at least, at the type of hypothetical party that presumes that all involved are interested in confessional trivia. Which itself involves the presumption that said persons are the types who would have a social life to begin with.

Come to think of it, there's a lot of presumption happening on my part here...

 

[MW]

Bureaucrats and KJV-onlyists.

Yes; I've seen them used by AV defenders. I prefer the AV but I could never work out what this had to do with the price of eggs in China. A good pedagogue will urge perseverance through difficulties as character building. Skill development means moving beyond one's current level of attainment.

 

[Ploutos]

With KJVOs, I've seen these types of readability scores used to argue that the KJV isn't really harder to read than any other versions. Bah humbug - it is harder, but I firmly believe that shouldn't be a deterrent and that, as you say, we should strive to move beyond our current attainments.

@davejonescue - surprised to see the sentences are so short, and that Turretin is supposedly easier than Bavinck or Muller!

 

[No Other Name]

 

[Ploutos]

Turning again to the Online Unique Words Calculator, I find that the Canons of Dort contain 1,991 unique words. "God" shows up 149 times (but "God's" shows up 65 times, so you could say 214 times here); "faith" shows up 71 times; "Christ" and "grace" each show up 59 times; "election" shows up 52 times.

Now this is interesting. I consider the 2nd Helvetic Confession a relatively "easy" read. It's by far the longest of the Reformed standards, but the writing style and content make it very enjoyable. By contrast, I found the Canons of Dort to be the "dryest" of all the Reformed standards, and therefore the hardest to slog through. However, the 2HC is listed here as having 3,858 unique words. I did notice that it counted the Roman numeral headings of each of the 30 chapters, so that would reduce the actual number to 3,828. That still represents a huge difference in vocabulary size compared to the 3 Forms of Unity.

In the 2nd Helvetic Confession, "God" shows up 384 times (the documents are all somewhat consistent so far - "God" accounts for 1-1.5% of all words used). "Christ" shows up 246 times; "church" shows up 223 times; "Lord" shows up 168 times; and "faith" shows up 127 times.

 

[Ploutos]

The Westminster Confession of Faith contains 1,902 unique words. Here again, things like chapter headings show up as separate words, so the actual unique word count is slightly less. Here are the top five non-filler words:
God - 143 times (~1.2%, in keeping with the others thus far)
Christ - 78 times
holy - 46 times
Spirit - 44 times
church - 39 times

The Westminster Larger Catechism contains 2,385 unique words. Taking away the 196 question numbers, that brings this down to 2,189. "God" shows up 209 times (~1.3%), "Christ" shows up 132 times, "commandment" shows up 77 times, "grace" shows up 59 times, and "man" shows up 51 times.

Last, and in this case very much least, the Westminster Shorter Catechism contains 895 unique words! This is decreased even further, to 788, if you take out the 107 unique words that come from the question numbers being counted. "God" shows up 79 times, which at ~1.9% is a higher frequency than in the other standards. "Commandment" shows up 72 times. "Christ" shows up 37 times. "Man" shows up 23 times, and "life" shows up 20 times.

One interesting angle would be to compare the number of unique words to the total words. The WLC's 2,200 unique words occur in a document of a bit over 15,000 words. The WSC's 800 unique words occur in a document of a bit over 4,000 words. The 2HC's 3,800 unique words occur in a document of over 33,000 words, and so it actually contains fewer unique words, proportionately, than any of the other standards.

An interesting point of comparison (since I've been reading through these lately) would be the short stories of O. Henry, famous for his extensive vocabulary. The story "Jimmy Hayes and Muriel" is short enough and easy enough to follow that I can read it to my girls at bedtime. Out of 1,921 words, it contains 802 unique words. "The Higher Abdication", one of his longer stories, comes in at 7,500 words but has 2,268 unique words.

 

[Ploutos]

Some more interesting statistics, not directly related to the OP, but good as a source of comparison for non-theological works.

"Little House on the Prairie", which I chose because it contains primarily 1- and 2-syllable words, has a total of ~52,600 words (less than twice as long as the Helvetic Confession). It has 4,011 unique words (maybe slightly less with chapter numbers and other non-words eliminated), with "Pa" appearing 692 times and "Laura" appearing 628 times. "Ma" shows up 528 times, and "Mary" shows up 293 times. Average word length is 3.98 letters, with a small number of 15-, 17-, 18-, and 20-letter words. What words of this length show up in the "Little House" books, I can't imagine or remember. I recall "flibbertygibbet" being used in some of the books, which is 15 letters and less-than-laden with theological import. The average sentence length is 11.93 words.

A random selection of O. Henry stories ("Madame Bo-Peep, of the Ranches"; "The Higher Abdication"; "An Afternoon Miracle"; "A Departmental Case"; "Confessions of a Humorist"; "The Emancipation of Billy"; "Telemachus, Friend") contains right around 33,000 words, with 7,050 unique words. Average sentence length is 15.41 words, and average word length is 4.51 letters. Apparently there are some 21-, 27-, and 38-letter words in this excerpt.

 

[EmilyF]

Westminster Shorter Catechism: ~4,200 words
Comparable in length to Ecclesiastes, Hosea, or 2 Corinthians

So you're telling me if I've memorised the WSC I can memorise any of those Books?
Interesting and encouraging. Imagine how much we could memorise if we pressed on in that matter.

 

[Ploutos]

So you're telling me if I've memorised the WSC I can memorise any of those Books?
Interesting and encouraging. Imagine how much we could memorise if we pressed on in that matter.

Bear in mind that the Shorter Catechism's 4200 words are divided into 107 questions and answers, and so it lends itself to ready memorization in a way not necessarily true of a Bible book that possesses the same number of words. Ephesians is roughly 3,000 words divided into 155 verses. Memorizing Ephesians is, in my opinion, roughly comparable in difficulty to memorizing the WSC. If you can do one, you can probably do the other.