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
Queen Victoria	60 million	69 years	1832–1901	Sections of the diary were censored by her daughter Beatrice.
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.
Thomas McGrath	9 million	50 years	1973–
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.
Anne Lister	5 million	34 years	1806–1840	Some entries were written in code
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.
Chen Xiukang	1.5 million	10 years	2012–	Began keeping a diary to cope with his wife's death
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	89 years	1936–present	"A 100-year-old American woman has journalled every day for 90 years… nearly 33,000 entries…" [Actually 89 years or 32,547 days]
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	American, Quaker, librarian at Swarthmore College. Over one hundred volumes, only 16 were preserved.
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."
Elizabeth Wynne Fremantle	Unknown	68 years	1789–1857	41 volumes. Her two sisters also kept diaries.
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.