wordagen.

1829 Westm. Rev. Apr. 417 The plates are..sufficient without all the wordage.

1858 W. Arnot Laws from Heaven 2nd Ser. 22 [The tongue] may revolve with the rapidity..of..machinery, throwing off..a continuous web of wordage.

1937 H. B. Hersey Pulpwood Editor vii. 105 If he filled his magazine with high-priced wordage he would soon be summoned to the head office..and asked if he had lost his reason.

1985 Univ. Cape Town Stud. in Eng. Feb. 61 Scientists and scholars who have published in abundance are actively solicited by editors, bookmen, and publishers for still more wordage to be put into print.

2002 Cheshire Life Aug. 120/1 It will take some time for all that wordage to be read and absorbed and a decision is not expected until the end of the year.

1919 Times 16 June 16/2 The amendment of the regulations so as to allow business cables to be sent in private codes, thus reducing the wordage.

1948 J. Thurber Let. 11 Mar. (2002) 423 I discovered that you and Ross seemed..a little proud of your abilities in estimating wordage by counting pages or hefting the manuscript.

1966 Punch 21 Sept. 455/2 Obviously he took his correspondence as seriously as he took his Journals and his daily wordage of publishable prose.

1999 I. Hamilton Penguin Bk. 20th-cent. Ess. (2000) (Foreword) p. xii An essay must always be conscious of its wordage. It should never be long enough to be a book and never short enough to fit on, say, a single page.