Novel, novella, short story -- how to distinguish Even for English speakers, the lines between novel, novella, and short story are not clear-cut. Wikipedia has 17,500 to 40,000 words as a novella, and 7,500–17,500 as a novelette; anything shorter is a short story. (It may be a generational thing, but novelette is less familiar to me.) In Japanese dictionaries, I see both and for novella. At first glance, would be the better choice; but is this word used in everyday speech? And indeed, for short story, is more common than ?. Also, I'm not familiar enough with Japanese literature and culture to know how those traditions affect terminology for historically Western texts. Are and used also for short story?

would be understood, but for most people, it does not mean any specific length. In ordinary speech, there is mostly just a distinction between and . That should be why novella is translated as , meaning what is shorter than full novels.

There is no standard for the lengths of novels. According to web searches (site 1, site 2), the following seems common.

* : 300> sheets
* : 100-300 sheets
* : 10-100 sheets,



where 'sheet' refers to a special paper for compositions that contains 400 characters per sheet.

Anything shorter would be called , etc.

* * *

is not current, and means exclusively a type of comic performance (short comic drama).