Doorstopper / Encyclopedias and Dictionaries

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• The 1951 edition of the Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language (Encyclopedic Edition) which is roughly 25cm long, 20cm wide, and at least 10cm thick. Broke the bank at a whopping two dollars, which is about $21 in 2022 dollars.
• The Oxford English Dictionary, considered by many to be as close to an official dictionary of English as could be (since English, unlike French, has no official standards) is 23 volumes. The planned Third Edition is projected to cost about $55 million and the estimated date of completion is 2037.
  • The text in the compact edition of the first edition Oxford English Dictionary has been shrunk to the point that you essentially need a magnifying glass to make use of the words, and it still takes up two volumes that are big and heavy enough to be dangerous. Each volume clocks in at about 4,000 pages, and some editions come with a really helpful magnifying glass.
  • The Mac Application version is enough to create a sinkhole lasting for hours. PRACTICALLY EVERY SINGLE WORD IS LINKED.
• The Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy^note unlike English, the Spanish language does have a central authority run by the government of Spain is two tomes that amount to 3548 pages in font size 8.
• At least one edition of the Large Chinese-Norwegian Dictionary clocks in at 1408 pages.
• One Japanese-English kanji dictionary raises the bar to 1748. The severely abridged version still has 430.
  • The full version is here. Look at that list price!
  • The 1999 edition of The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary comes in at a respectable 1008.
• There is an encyclopaedic dictionary of the Spanish language. It includes — aside from definitions — short biographies, maps, diagrams (including a full page schematic of a pocket watch); and the appendices include difficulties of the language, a preposition guide, and a compendium of Spanish conjugations (Spanish is a hard language). Everything in three volumes totalling 3200 pages.
• The Merck Index is about 2198 pages.
• A 130-year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica is 25 volumes, with each one being eight to ten centimetres thick. And this was published in the late 1870s.
• The German dictionary and encyclopaedia Grimm currently consists (it is still updated and added to) of about 35 books between five and ten cm thick. And this is the paperback edition.
• During the Ming Dynasty at least 3,000 scholars spent 4 years, beginning in 1403, working on the Yongle Dadian, an encyclopedia with 11,095 volumes and 22,877 chapters. There are an estimated 370 million Chinese characters used.
• The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, the most comprehensive and authoritative overview of English grammar, clocks in at 1860 pages (and you thought your English class was hard).
• The Physicians' Desk Reference, a pharmaceutical reference, was provided annually, for free, to practicing physicians (at least in the United States). The company that makes them finally gave up on printing it in 2017, at which point the print copy weighed 4.6lb/2.1 kilos, and now offers the information online only. Since the information was available electronically for years before this, very few doctors bothered with the paper version, and it was more common to see the books being used as literal paperweights and doorstoppers.
• The Oxford Classical Dictionary Third ed. is about 6 cm thick and has over 6,000 entries on ancient Greek and Roman Civilizations if you ever needed a complete reference.
• The Meyers Konversationslexikon: well over 30 volumes, 16 cm wide, 7 cm thick, 25 cm high, all around 1,000 pages, 3 mm writing height in fracture, printed in 1906. It's an encyclopaedia on just about everything known back then along with facsimiles, maps, tables and other pictures.
• Somebody decided to print and bind part of the English Wikipedia. This was the result.
  • As of July 2023, Wikipedia totals around 4,300,000,000 words across 6,600,000 articles, which would require over 3,300 volumes to print.
  • The artistic Print Wikipedia project makes the entire Wikipedia available to purchase as a paper print-on-demand publication, divided into 700-page hardcover volumes. It takes 525 volumes to get to the letter 'A'. The letter 'A' then takes 448 volumes. Heck, the table of contents itself takes up 91 volumes!
• The unabridged edition of William Vollman's "calculus of violence" Rising Up and Rising Down weighs in at 3,352 pages across seven volumes.
• The printed version of Chemical Abstracts filled whole bookshelves (the company tossed in the towel as of January 1, 2010 and is now only offering the publication electronically) considering the book provides overviews for over 50 million chemical substances, their invention, production, uses, patents, properties; the same for 60 million proteins and DNA sequences; along with a subsection devoted to summarising all major scholarly publications on chemistry from the past 103 years… and is all daily updated.
  • One of their sales agents managed to crash the CAS servers once with an demonstration. He explained how to do a complex search. And all ten people in the room pressed "Enter" at the same time; cue general computational blackout at the CAS mainframe.
• The most recent edition of The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia clocks in at over 1200 pages across 3 volumes.
• The Yellow Pages are books that contain every single phone number in a given area, as well as plenty of advertising. They usually contain several hundred pages even in a more sparsely-populated area. Anybody who uses the Yellow Pages will most likely remember having crushed a toe with one. Recently shrunk to paperback size, with the same number of pages.
• The thirteenth edition of Svenska Akademiens ordlista (The Swedish Academy's Dictionary) has 1,130 pages.
• Pokonry's Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (a huge Indo-European dictionary) clocks in at 1,648 pages, is often divided into 2 volumes… screw it, here's the Amazon link.
• The legendary Capital by Karl Marx. Three volumes of well over five hundred pages each, about 2,500 in total… and he was working on a fourth when he died.
  • The only "real" volume he ever finished was the first one. Marx was working on the other two but died before adding the finishing touches to them. Engels is the one who finished, edited and published the other two volumes. The fourth one eventually saw the light, but it wasn't past the preparation stage and instead of being called Capital: volume IV it was called Critical History of the Theory of Surplus.
    • Capital is itself a sequel to Marx's earlier work A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
• De Dikke Van Dale (the 'fat' Van Dale), the most well-known Dutch dictionary, is divided in three volumes and has a total of 4,464 pages.
• The Story of the Great War is an edited compilation of what happened during World War I. It was compiled from the official, censored accounts, was mostly written during World War I, has no editorial commentary, and still runs 8 volumes (each of which is a 500+ page doorstopper by itself).
• The 1000...Before You Die series is made of these. Each books lists 1000 or 1001 items (movies, books, albums, natural wonders) that you must watch/play/read/see before you die. Each one reaches into the 900 page area.
• One Polish "encyclopedia for children" is a rather ridiculous example: it's 868 pages long, all printed on glossy paper, and thus even an adult would find it cumbersome to pick up. And it's meant as a gift for 7-year-old children!
• The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics: essentially the annually updated Great Big Book of Everything covering nearly all recorded information on nearly all hard data and physics known to humanity. Subjects include musical scales, the physical properties of nearly all known substances,^note ranging from melting point to magnetic susceptibility to shear strength to materials known to be superconducting and the temperature ranges at which they do so, useful mathematical equations and tables, physical constants, safety procedures for dangerous chemicals (such as poisons and their cures), diagrams of molecular structures, physical stats on the moons and planets of our solar system,^note such as their surface gravity, size, mass, and composition, and several thousand pages of other useful, interesting, and simply random assorted data about the world around us. Printed in 12-pt font on dictionary-style paper nearly thin enough to read through, it still manages to measure in at 8.5 x 11 inches tall and wide, and as of the 2007–2008 edition, 3.5 inches thick. The modern editions weigh in at about 10 pounds (about 4 kg), and 2014's 95th edition clocks in at 2693 pages. The book at one point used a square 6x6 inch format, but they switched to the rectangular 8.5x11 format when the book passed the point of being a cube, and began looking more like the page image.
• The most recent edition of Black's Law Dictionary comes in at about 1,800 pages.
• After it got taken down the first time, Wikileaks was mirrored but some of the sites architecture didn't make it for some strange reason. For a while, it lacked a search bar and the only way to view the site was to either download the whole of information or click The print all button. If you did you were greeted with a nice thirty thousand or so print order, often followed by an error screen. And then you would have had to sift through it all, most of which was completely innocuous and unspeakably boring government communications.
• The most prominent publisher of dictionaries in France is Paul Robert, with the Robert line of dictionaries. Their standard hardcover desk dictionary is around four and a half pounds, at over 2,800 pages. The part that tends to horrify students of the language? That edition of the dictionary is called Le Petit Robert. Yes, the little Robert. The unabridged version, Le Robert, is around the size of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the company wisely prefers to offer it on CD or DVD to non-libraries.
• Sports encyclopedias can be pretty massive. Total Baseball was published in 8 editions between 1989 and 2004. Each addition contained comprehensive statistics for every player in Major League Baseball. They also had season and team records, league and team histories, select player biographies, post-season and All-Star game recaps, essays on various aspects of the game (e.g. Negro Leagues, baseball journalism, player nicknames), and even directories for managers, coaches, and umpires. All this packed into over 2400 pages. Total Football and Total Hockey were every bit as comprehensive, albeit at just under 2000 pages each. Cricket fans in the UK have enjoyed Wisden Cricketer's Almanack every year since 1864, making it the longest-running sports annual in the world. Each edition contains hugely detailed coverage and scorecards of every First class game played in the previous English summer, summaries of minor counties, second eleven, university, school and premier club cricket, as well as the Village Cup, not to mention international results and the Wisden Review. The 2019 edition came in at a hefty 1536 pages.
• Beilstein's Handbook of Organic Chemistry used to be 503 volumes describing 440,000 compounds. At this point, the publishers decided to go digital. Now it's a database over twenty times the size.
• The Yongle Dadian, commissioned on 1403 and completed by 1408 for the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty, can run for the title of biggest paper encyclopedia, comprising 22,937 manuscript rolls or chapters, in 11,095 volumes, done by a team of 2,169 scholars. Incorporating around 8,000 texts, some from the earliest times, it covered subjects such as agriculture, religion, literature and natural sciences. For comparison, it had six times as many words (in English equivalent) as the Encyclopædia Britannica. Unfiortunately, die to various fires and armed conflicts, fewer than 400 volumes survive today, comprising about 800 chapters (rolls), or only 3.5 percent of the original work.
• The Halliwell's Film Guide series of books became this over time, with the final 2008 edition clocking in at 1408 pages.
• The 2023 edition of DK's Encyclopedia of Gardening clocks in at 752 pages.
• A Tibetan-English Dictionary by H. A. Jaschke has 704 pages.
• Shreir's Corrosion is an exhaustive four-volume work on everything involving the subject of corrosion of both metallic and non-metallic materials in reaction to liquids and gases. It covers everything from industrial settings and applications for the medical field to electrochemistry and spectroscopy. Rather tellingly, Amazon and Barnes & Noble approximate it to be 4,000 pages instead of giving a precise number. The cheapest you can find it is over $1550 as of December 2023.

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