Book of Mormon by the Numbers: 6,604 Verses, 337 Names and 115 Languages

In March 1830, E. B. Grandin's shop in Palmyra, New York, finished 5,000 copies of a 588-page book. Today there are more than 200 million copies in 115 languages. Book of Mormon by the Numbers measures the book itself, page by page, and then follows where it went. It's a good place to start before the Book of Mormon returns to Come, Follow Me in 2028.

The shape of the book

Alma alone is nearly a third of the whole book. The pace is uneven too: Alma spends its pages on 38 years, while 4 Nephi crosses almost three centuries in under 2,000 words.

His name, on nearly every page

Susan Easton Black counted 3,925 references to Jesus Christ under 101 names and titles, about one every 1.7 verses. The page shades every chapter by how often a dozen of those titles appear, so you can tap any chapter and see.

A cast of 337 names

The Book of Mormon names 337 people, places and things. 188 of those names appear nowhere in the Bible. There's no F, Q, V, W, X or Y in the book's own names. Those letters show up only in Bible names like Lucifer.

From dictation to 5,000 books

• 116 pages lost: the first manuscript pages, lent to Martin Harris in the summer of 1828, went missing and were never found.
• Seven or more scribes: Joseph Smith dictated to at least seven scribes. Of the 144 surviving pages of the original manuscript, 124 are in Oliver Cowdery's hand.
• Two manuscripts: the original was placed in a Nauvoo cornerstone in 1841, and water ruined most of it. Only 28% of the text survives in it. The printer's copy survived almost whole and is missing only three lines.
• $2,450 to $35 million: what the printer's copy sold for in 1903, and in 2017, when the Church bought it.

Same words, new pages

The chapters and verse numbers we quote today didn't exist in 1830. The first edition printed 1 Nephi 1 as one long paragraph. Chapters and verses arrived in 1879. Royal Skousen spent decades comparing both manuscripts with every major edition, and Book of Mormon, Connected condenses 4,581 of his entries into verse-by-verse study notes. Most are spelling, grammar or a dropped word. A few changed a phrase you know.

Every nation, kindred, tongue

For 21 years the book was only in English. Danish came in 1851. In the 1990s the Church printed about one copy every seven seconds, and the second 100 million copies took 23 years, compared with 169 for the first. The book also reached people who don't read print: a Braille edition in 1936, and American Sign Language on 15 videotapes, 60 hours of signing, finished in 2001 after 11 years of work led by Minnie Mae Wilding-Diaz.

How long to read it yourself?

At 200 words a minute, the whole book is about 22 hours. Pick a pace and a start date at the bottom of the page and it tells you when you'll finish.

Questions

Where do the word and name counts come from?

Word and phrase counts are our own, made from the current English edition. Every other figure links to its source in “How we counted.”

Is this an official Church resource?

No. By the Numbers is an independent Weak Things project. The figures come from official Church reports and other published sources, listed on the page.

Keep exploring

• The Restoration by the Numbers: the 74 days of translation
• Dead Sea Scrolls by the Numbers: Isaiah on a scroll from about 125 BC
• Book of Mormon, Connected: every verse with the conference talks that cite it

See all the projects on the By the Numbers page.

See the shape of the book →