Hamilton’s Word-Per-Minute Average Is Ridiculously High

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway smash hit now on Disney Plus in the form of a theatrically-filmed recording of the production, which dramatizes the life and death of U.S. founding father Alexander Hamilton.

Beloved by critics and audiences around the world, and without a doubt one of the most successful plays ever, Hamilton tells its little known yet historically-impactful story with tons of originality and flair, boasting exceptional music, acting and production. Thanks to its incorporation of hip-hop and more modern dance styles, there’s a tremendous amount of energy coursing through the play and its an energy that rarely lets up.

In fact, according to star Lin-Manuel Miranda, if Hamilton had been written as a traditional play, it would’ve taken significantly longer to tell its story.

“It would have to be 12 hours long, because the amount of words on the bars when you’re writing a typical song — that’s maybe got 10 words per line,” he said. “Whereas here we can cram all this shit in all the margins.”

But Hamilton is not a traditional play and it packs in more words-per-minute than any other production. And if you’ve seen it, that shouldn’t come as a surprise.

FiveThirtyEight.com has crunched the numbers and found that Hamilton crams 20,520 words into its 2 hour and 23 minute runtime. And if you do the math, that works out to 144 words per minute. For comparison’s sake, the play in second place is Spring Awakening with 77 words per minute.

Of course, there are a couple of, let’s say, slower songs in Hamilton, with King George III being responsible for some of the less fast-paced tracks. And according to FiveThirtyEight, the fastest songs have nearly 200 words per minute while the slowest only have about 64 to 80 per minute.

Still, even when it slows down a bit, there’s a palpable energy that runs throughout all of Hamilton and it’s an exceptionally well produced and written production. And if you’ve never seen it, you can now find out what all the fuss is about by heading over to Disney Plus.