Millions of people worldwide are looking forward to the next episode of A Game of Thrones, a television series adaptation of the epic fantasy novel series, A Song of Ice and Fire, by American author George R. R. Martin. Fans are likewise eagerly awaiting the expected release of the sixth book in the series, The Winds of Winter, later this year.

Since its first publication in 1996, A Song of Ice and Fire has gained extreme popularity while also accumulating a wealth of criticism. The series' numerous admirers along with researchers and writers have sought to puzzle out the numerous enigmas, mysteries and questions of the novels, a phenomenon which contributes to the unique connection some have developed to the series. 

One such analytic fascination has been the inhabitants of the world of Ice and Fire and the dialogue among them. Numbering well over 1,000, their relationships have received intense scrutiny in terms of the total volume of words spoken, total words spoken by character, and the relative quality of the books in the series based on total lines spoken in each.

  • In the 4,273 pages of the 5-volume series, the characters speak a total 749,406 words.
  • The most talkative character in the series is Tyrion Lannister even though he was not included in the fourth book, A Feast for Crows. He has spoken 46,997 words total in the series, which is 17,000 words more than Jon Snow, the second most talkative character.
  • The House of Lannister as a whole spoke more words than the House of Stark (including Jon): 125,837 words as compared to 86,282.
  • Most often conversations occurred between Dany Targarien and Jorah Mormont who are the fourth and the tenth most talkative characters, respectively.
  • Not all characters in the Song of Ice and Fire are as talkative as Dany and Jorah. More than half of all the characters (617) spoke less than 100 words in the series. Even Hodor, who due to his mental deficiency can pronounce only one word - his name - has spoken 234 words.
  • If you assess the quality of the books by the number of lines spoken by the characters in each, then books four and five rate slighlty worse than the first three. However, the number of speaking characters themselves (440) in book 5, A Dance with Dragons, exceeds the other books in the series and is more than twice the numer of speaking charactres in book 1, A Game of Thrones.

 

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