there are similar difficulties in European languages: in some cases it is arbitrary whether an expression is written as one word or two: e.g. airshow vs. air show; in German it is very common to link two or more words together to form compound words – merely reflecting a feature of the language. In Japanese, some characters represent "words" and others only represent "syllables". A rough approximation can sometimes be obtained by citing the word count of a translation into a Latin alphabet language like English (if such a translation exists), but this will vary to some extent depending on the style of English adopted by the translator. However, citing a translation has the advantage that it indicates how many words are required to convey the same meaning in the target text, not how many "words" the source text actually contains. Criteria For the purposes of the list, a "novel" is defined as a single work in print or electronic form that has been published through a mainstream publisher, has acquired publishing rights from authors, or has garnered significant coverage as self-published work. A "single work" is defined as works thought of as one novel by the author but published in multiple volumes for the sake of convenience. Excluded are non-notable self-published works (included printed-on-demand, vanity, and fanfiction works), unpublished novels, novel sequences, novel cycles, and record-grabbing stunts written solely for the title of the longest work. List Other list (non-Latin and Cyrillic) Malayalam Avakasikal by Vilasini: This book in Malayalam is known as the second longest written in an Indian language. It contains 3,958 pages in four volumes and took 10 years to complete. Japanese Nansō Satomi Hakkenden (; ) (The 8 Dog Warriors of the Satomi Clan of Nansō) written by Kyokutei Takizawa Bakin is a very popular epic historical fantasy and romance novel of the Yomihon category in 106 volumes. It was written and published over a period of nearly twenty-eight years (1814–42). Tokugawa Ieyasu by Sōhachi Yamaoka: The 40 volumes of this historical novel were published serially between 1950 and 1967. The complete text includes more than 10 million Japanese characters. It is the longest Japanese novel after Nansō Satomi Hakkenden and also one of the longest ever written. Daibosatsu Toge by : Published in 41 volumes and 1533 chapters, this unfinished historical novel includes 5.7 million Japanese characters. Chinese by Sun Haohui: Published in 6