My English teacher claimed, that if I survive the first 20 pages of any book, the reading will get much easier because the words that occurred on those pages constitute 90% of all words in the book. So after you reach this threshold you don’t have to go back and forth to the dictionary.

Was he right? (TLDR: Kind of.)

The Experiment

We have verified this by using three books:

- The Secret Adversary detective fiction novel by Agatha Christie,

- Eve’s Diary short story by Mark Twain,

- Ulysses the heavyweight champion in incomprehensibility by James Joyce.

From each of this books, we took out all their words. We got rid of any punctuation and we turned words to their basic forms (went to go, cars to car, jumps to jump etc.) We assumed that 300 words will make a full page and we started counting. Actually, we let the computer to do the job.

We would like to know two things:

1. How do new words appear in the book?

2. What percent of the book is written with the words that appear page by page?

On the following plots, the horizontal axis denotes the page number. The green line on the plots below answers the first question. It shows what percentage of unique words appeared to this page. The blue line answers the second. It shows how much of the book is written with the words that appeared on this page or earlier.

Results

The Secret Adversary is an average length book. It is 250 pages with exactly 75208 words. Each word in average appears 14 times, what gives us 5248 unique words in the book.

You will know 90% of words after 40 pages which are 16.00% of the book.

Plot with word coverage for The Secret Adversary

Eve’s Diary is a short story. Its 22 pages contain only 6858 words (1104 unique). You will know 90% of them after just 9 pages (40.91% of a book).

Plot with word coverage for Eve’s Diary

Ulysses is lengthy 870 pages with 261202 words. In average words appear 11 times. There are 23920 unique words. You will know 90% of words after 221 pages which are 25.40% of a book.

AND NOW IN THE RIGHT CORNER… ULYSESSSSSS

So what do the plots tell us? If we take a look at the green lines, we see that the new words appear almost through the entire book. The line is almost straight, so each page will bring you new words to learn. However, if we take a look at the blue lines, we see that the proportion of total words, covered by the words we learn page by page, grows rapidly. It is due to the fact that some words in the language appear more often than the others. At a couple of initial pages, we meet almost all the most popular words.

The new words will pop out through the entire book gradually, but when you get through the beginning the words you met so far will cover most of the book.

Summary

The new words will pop out through the entire book gradually, but when you get through the beginning the words you met so far will cover most of the book.

It is not 20 pages but my teacher was somewhat right. The exact number of pages to read may vary depending on the book length and author’s variegated language. However, it probably won’t get much harder then Ulysses, where you need to read 221 pages (25% of the book).

Shameless Plug

If you need help getting through a book ask Vocapouch Trainer. It will translate any words you don’t know and it will make sure you will repeat them in the future.