List of longest novels

This is a list of the longest novels over 500,000 words published through a mainstream publisher. Until recently, the longest novel was Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus, originally published (1649–54) in ten parts, each part in three volumes. Artamène is generally attributed to Madeleine de Scudéry.

Composing a list of longest novels yields different results depending on whether pages, words or characters are counted. Length of a book is typically associated with its size—specifically page count—leading many to assume the largest and thickest book equates to its length. Word counts are a direct way to measure the length of a novel by a measure that is unaffected by variations of format and page size.

Three possible ways to determine length exist and each has its own method for determining length. Character counts are at best estimations of spaces, written characters and punctuation; Guinness World Records uses this criterion. Word counts is another method that counts each word and omits punctuation, but still considered an estimation for length. Using computer software to count words is the currently preferred method for academia and publications. An arbitrary way is to assume that a standard formatted page with 12 pt Courier font and double-spaced lines is 250 words. Due to formatting, page counts are subject to change from font, style, formatting or paper size of the published work and cannot be considered a measure of length despite it being the easiest physical indicator of length. For the purposes of this list, word counts are ideal. Page counts are a relative indicator of length; for proper comparison the page size will be included.

Some difficulty is created when comparing word counts across writing systems. The logographic Chinese characters used to write East Asian languages each represent one morpheme and are not separated by spaces. The same character may at times stand for one word, and other times form part of a larger word. For instance the characters zhong 中 and guo 囯 can be used independently to mean "middle" and "kingdom", respectively, but can also be combined into Zhongguo 中囯, "China" (i.e. "The Middle Kingdom"). One could theoretically construct a noun phrase Zhongguo zhong guo 中囯中囯 meaning "kingdoms in the middle of China". The absence of any formal marking of word boundaries means that it would be difficult to mechanically determine if such a phrase consists of two, three, or four words without knowing Chinese. East Asian bibliographies therefore generally give only the character count without attempting any word count.

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