Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address contains 272 words according to the commonly cited count.
Lincoln delivered the address on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The speech followed the Battle of Gettysburg, fought from July 1 to July 3, 1863, during the American Civil War.
The address is famous for its brevity and its argument that the war tested whether a nation founded on equality could endure. Lincoln connected the cemetery dedication to the Declaration of Independence and described the conflict as a struggle for a “new birth of freedom.”
Word counts can vary slightly depending on editorial choices, such as whether a title, hyphenated term, or contraction is counted as one or more words. The widely cited figure is 272 words. That figure refers to the speech as commonly transcribed, not to the number of words on every surviving manuscript copy, whose punctuation and wording differ in small ways.