How many words are in 'The Lord of the Rings'?

There are roughly 561,792

How did I come up with that?

Number of lines per average page of type = 44

Number of characters per average line of type = 63

Divide 63 by 6 (Average word being 6 characters long) = 10.5

Multiply Lines by words (44 X 10.5) = 462

Now

Multiply number of words per page (462) by number of pages (1,216) = 561,792

It's only a rough estimate, but it gets you in the right ball park. The only way to know for sure is to count each word in the text. I used the 50th anniversary one volume edition for my calculation.

An electronic copy, including all headers, indices and appendixes shows 525,405.

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I have an electronic copy. Not including the appendices, the indices, the prologue, forward, table of contents, etc, (but including chapter titles, book titles and chapter numbers) word count shows 468,420.