The World's Shortest Story

In my writing class we've been discussing what makes a good story and I've come to the conclusion that size doesn't matter. Even when your story in only 17 words long.

The authorship of the world's shortest story has often been accredited to Fredric Brown. Published in 1948, his two-sentence horror story is considered a literary masterpiece.

The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock upon the door.

The concept of the story, however, has existed as a British ghost story for hundreds of years. The longest version that I know of only outnumbers it by eleven words.

The angel whispered to Markos in his left ear: "You will die the moment you utter the word 'doyen.'" "Doyen?" asked Markos, intrigued, and he fell dead.

One word shorter than that is the version presented by Thomas Baily Aldrich somewhere around 1870.

"A woman is sitting alone in a house. She knows she is alone in the whole world; every other living thing is dead. The doorbell rings."

There are two more stories of equal word length with Brown's, though if you want to mince matters down to the number of letters, at 57 his is neither the shortest nor the longest. There is another unaccredited story which shares 17 words but is made up of 72 letters.

"Do you believe in ghosts?" said he to his co-passenger. "Don't you?" said the other, and vanished.

The shortest of these three 17 word stories is "A Horror Story Shorter by One Letter Than the Shortest Horror Story Ever Written," presented by Ron Smith in 1957. I'm not sure what version Smith was referring to as his tale is shorter than Brown's by 3 letters (and longer than the shortest by 9).

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a lock on the door . . .

But Smith's story is not the shortest, even in my limited knowledge. There exist 2 other unaccredited versions of this tale, one written in 13 words.

"He sat alone in the dark, afraid. Someone put matches in his hand."

But to my knowledge the shortest story yet is made up only 10 words.

Two hunters, one tiger. One hunter, one tiger. One tiger.

I have run across other stories, shorter yet. The shortest being only two words. But in my opinion they don't have enough elements to consider them true stories. Still, if you're interested try subscribing to Story Bytes for weekly emails with short stories (ranging from 0 to 2048 words).

[Information on stories and authors provided by Brad Bostian]