How much writing is that?
Plain text is astonishingly small. Every book you will ever read fits in the space of one film.
2 × a novel
1 MB is bigger than 4 of the 7 references on this page.
Reference figures are measurements and are rounded; the unit conversion behind them is exact.
| Reference | Size | Yours ÷ theirs | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| a tweet | 0.00028 MB | 3,571× | |
| a page of prose | 0.003 MB | 333× | About 500 words |
| a 3 000-word essay | 0.018 MB | 55.6× | |
| a novel | 0.5 MB | 2× | About 90 000 words |
| a phone photo | 4 MB | 0.25× | For comparison |
| the King James Bible | 4.4 MB | 0.227× | |
| English Wikipedia text | 24,000 MB | 1/24,000 |
Worth knowing
- An entire novel is about 500 kB of plain text — smaller than a single phone photo.
- A lifetime of reading at a book a week for 60 years is about 1.5 GB of text. A phone holds eighty lifetimes of it.
Frequently asked
How many words are in a megabyte?
About 170 000 in plain ASCII, at roughly six bytes per word including the space. Formatting, images and metadata make real documents far larger.
Why are Word documents so much bigger than the text in them?
Because a .docx is a zipped bundle of XML, styles, fonts and revision history. The words are usually a small minority of the file.