Book Bearings
Thing Explainer
- 65 pages · about 1 hour
- First published 2015
- 9 editions
Bookshop.org links may earn us a commission. It supports independent bookstores and costs you nothing.
1 About this book
Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words is a 2015 illustrated non-fiction book created by Randall Munroe, in which the author attempts to explain various complex subjects using only the 1,000 most common English words.
The word "thousand" is not one of those most-used words, thus things are described using "the ten hundred words people use the most often." Munroe conceptualized the book in 2012, when drawing a schematic of the Saturn V rocket for his webcomic xkcd.
Summary adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Good for readers who want: science, technology, and a short read.
- Science
- Technology
- Science, popular works
- Science, miscellanea
- Basic English
2 About Randall Munroe
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
3 More by Randall Munroe
4 Similar books
- Atoms Under the Floorboards by Chris Woodford
- A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
- Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
- The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan
- Ignited Minds by A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
- Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari
- Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking
- Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic