The Rev. Robert W. Shields, a preacher and teacher who for a quarter-century spent four hours a day recording his life in five-minute segments — from changing light bulbs to pondering God to visiting the bathroom — and ended up with a 37.5-million-word diary, perhaps the most verbose one ever, died on Oct. 15 at his home in Dayton, Wash.

The cause of death was a heart attack, his daughter Klara Hicks said.

Mr. Shields was 89, and little more than a decade had passed since his second stroke ended his ability to type. He said in an interview with National Public Radio in 1994 that stopping the diary would be like “turning off my life” — so perhaps his spiritual death was in June 1997.

He knocked out three million words in his best years, a million in slow ones. Guinness World Records does not address diary word lengths, but said the longest diary — measured in duration — was done over 91 years by Col. Ernest Loftus of Harare, Zimbabwe.

Mr. Shields’s 37.5 million words apparently exceeded the more than 21 million in the colorful diary of Edward Robb Ellis, a newspaperman who died in 1998, and the 17 million words of Arthur Crew Inman, a reclusive poet who died in 1963. The 17th-century London diary of Samuel Pepys was a mere 1.25 million words.