Shortest Book Titles in History

CJ Franklin
Jul 20, 2025
3 min read

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover… but what about its title?

Titles are pretty important, some people say.

Titles are pretty important.

See. Someone put it in quotes.

What if your title isn’t very long? Does that matter?

That’s not what I’m going to answer here.

I just want to know what the shortest titles out there are.

Qualifications

In my research, I came across many titles, so I added 3 qualifiers to help sort this list out.

First, the book has to be in English. (I don’t know anything else..)

Secondly, it must have at least 3,000 ratings on Goodreads.

And third; no subtitle nonsense. (Looking at you Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald. That trick ain’t working here!)

Let’s roll.

The Mystical 1-Letter Titles

So.. there are a lot of books that have titles that are 1 letter. But only about 12 I could find that fit the qualifications.

I’ll share a few of them below. Before that, here are a few fun facts about them.

The Low-Scrabble-Score 2 Letter Titles

2 letters is a strange place to be.

We have words in English that have 2 letters. It, us, do, as, so, other words.

This category becomes a fun time. We run into some more punctuation issues in this category. We have creative spacing. And we have one book that dominates the 2-letter category.

The 2 Letter Book — It by Stephen King (over 1 million ratings…)

Not sure where numbers fit.. — ’48 by James Herbert

Punctuation marks are fun and underused— Yo! by Julia Alverez

Not quite a word? — Rx by Tracy Lynn

Either cute romance or scary dystopian title — We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

I’m not sure how ampersands count — Q&A by Vikas Swarup

There is no 2 letter word I found repeated as a popular book title. There are a few books called Us but none that qualified.

Not many trends to pull away from this category. The ratings were all over the place. The names were different. One thing remains true; Stephen King sells.

3 Letters Seems Sort of Normal Now

3 letters.

It’s almost too many now.

And there are a lot of 3 letter book titles. We have a lot of 3 letter words. Her, Hat, Cat, Bat, etc.

Most ratings on a 3 letter title — You by Caroline Kepnes — 250,000+ ratings

Second most ratings on a 3 letter title — ’Tis by Frank McCourt — 63,000+ ratings

Normal, but won a Nobel Peace Prize — Day by Elie Wiesel

The cover scares me — Cut by Patricia McCormick

Fun punctuation! — S/He by Minnie Bruce Pratt

Pulitzer Winner — Wit by Margaret Edson

Even Plato did it with 3 — Ion by Plato

A name I guess? — Zel by Donna Jo Napoli

I don’t have any takeaways from this category. We’re sort of back into normal title territory. Does seem like a lot of memoirs and more serious works with 3 letter titles.

Also, FDR and JFK. (What’s going on there…)

Okay, these are just normal 4 letter titles.

So, this is probably the end of this article.

There are so many 4 letter titles.

It’s normal.

Most ratings — 1984 by George Orwell — over 4 million ratings (HEARD OF IT?)

Another big deal — Dune by Frank Herbert — over 1.2 million ratings (also the grandfather of modern sci-fi)

Plato did it again — Meno by Plato

Tate James loves 4 letter titles — Hate, Liar, Fake, Kate by Tate James (all in the Madison Kate series)

Popular adaptations of 4 letter titles — Room by Emma Donoghue + Jaws by Peter Benchley

Stephen King wrote a book about a killer cellphone and I need everyone to know about it — Cell by Stephen King (spoiler.. it’s not really about a killer cellphone)

Scary title for a virus book — Feed by Mira Grant (the series is called Newsflesh which is creepy)

Neat name? — Hild by Nicola Griffith