Word.ws English Dictionary

Hawking Index

Hawking Index proper noun: a humorous measure of how far people will, on average, read through a particular book before giving up.

Proper noun

the Hawking Index

  1. A humorous measure of how far people will, on average, read through a particular book before giving up.
    • The mathematician Ellenberg has developed the Hawking Index, but according to his own statements only for entertainment and not for scientific purposes.2024, Jan Krone, Tassilo Pellegrini, editors, Handbook of Media and Communication Economics: A European Perspective, Springer Nature, →ISBN, page 703

Origin of Hawking Index

Invented by American mathematician Jordan Ellenberg in 2014, and named after English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, whose book A Brief History of Time (1988) has been called “the most unread book of all time”.

Questions about Hawking Index

What does Hawking Index mean?
Hawking Index means a humorous measure of how far people will, on average, read through a particular book before giving up.
What part of speech is Hawking Index?
Hawking Index is a proper noun.

Words near Hawking Index in the dictionary

  1. Hawkin
  2. hawkiness
  3. hawking
  4. Hawking energies
  5. Hawking energy
  6. Hawking Index
  7. Hawking radiation
  8. Hawking's paradox
  9. Hawkinge
  10. Hawkingian
  11. hawkings

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Hawking Index (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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