# List of longest diaries

This is a list of diaries notable for their exceptional length, primarily by word count but also by duration.
Table of diaries sortable by word count and duration :
| Author | Word count | Duration | Period | Notes |
| Laura Penrose Francis | 40 million | 60 years | 1952–2012 | Word count and duration as of 2012. |
| Robert Shields | 37.5 million | 25 years | 1972–1997 | Exact word count not available until 2049. |
| Claude Fredericks | 30 million | 80 years | 1932–2013 | Word count is estimated; the manuscript runs to 65,000 pages. |
| Joseph Holloway | 25 million | 45 years | 1899–1944 | "Dublin playgoer." Published diaries 1899 to 1944. |
| Edward Robb Ellis | 22 million | 71 years | 1927–1998 | |
| Tony Benn | 20 million | 69 years | 1940–2009 | A better estimate is 15.7m. "The full unedited diaries [in 2007] amount to around fifteen million words." |
| Heinrich Witt | 18 million | 70 years | 1859–1890 | Witt (1799–1892) was born in Germany, lived in Peru, and wrote in English. |
| Arthur Crew Inman | 17 million | 44 years | 1919–1963 | 155 volumes. Other accounts state 10 million words. |
| Nella Last | 12 million | 28 years | 1939–1967 | Participant in Mass Observation project. |
| Dr. John Henry Salter | 10 million | 83 years | 1849–1932 | GP of Tolleshunt D'Arcy, Essex. |
| Henri-Frédéric Amiel | 6 million | 42 years | 1839–1881 | 173 journals; 16,800 pages. |
| Ellsworth James | 5.9 million | 63 years | 1944–2007 | Word count does not include first year (1944) which was handwritten. 1946-2007 manually typed. |
| John Gadd | 4 million | 45 years | 1975–2020 | Started in 1947 but kept consistently from 1975. |
| George C. Edler | 2.859 million | 80 years | 1907–1987 | 76 volumes. 1987 and 1988 Guinness Book of World Records has different dates. |
| Henry David Thoreau | 2 million | 25 years | 1837–1861 | Over 2 million words in 39 notebooks. |
| Beatrice Webb | 1.79 million | 70 years | 1873–1943 | Diaries available online. |
| Samuel Pepys | 1.25 million | 9 years | 1660–1669 | Written in shorthand. The 1893 edition is available online. |
| Margaret Elizabeth Fountaine | 1 million | 61 years | 1878–1939 | 12 volume diary. |
| Jean Lucey Pratt | 1 million | 61 years | 1925–1986 | Over a million words in 45 exercise books. |
| Ernest Achey Loftus | Unknown | 91 years | 1896–1987 | Guinness World Record for longest kept diary. |
| Evie Riski | Unknown | 90 years | 1936–2025 | "A 100-year-old American woman has journalled every day for 90 years… nearly 33,000 entries…" |
| Caroline Bray | Unknown | 87 years | 1815–1902 | Née Hennell; she was the intimate friend of George Eliot. Diary and commonplace book. |
| Anne Perkins | Unknown | 74 years | 1935–2009 | Kept a diary beginning at the age of ten, and wrote over a hundred volumes. Sixteen volumes are held at Swarthmore College, where she worked as a librarian. |
| Claude Mauriac | Unknown | 69 years | 1927–1995 | Lejeune gives both 68 and 69 years. "We have yet to count the total number of pages, but the journal measures three and a half meters." |
| Sanjōnishi Sanetaka | Unknown | 62 years | 1455–1537 | His Sanetaka Kōki is also given a duration of 63 years. |
| William Lyon Mackenzie King | Unknown | 57 years | 1893–1950 | Word count not stated; the manuscript exceeds 50,000 pages. |
William Matthews, in his British diaries: An annotated bibliography of British diaries written between 1442 and 1942 (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1950) lists 400 diaries with a duration of 30 years or more.