How many verses are in the Mahabharata?

The round number is a hundred thousand. The epic claims it for itself, and the name Shatasahasri Samhita, the collection of a hundred thousand, follows from that claim. A shloka is a couplet of two lines of sixteen syllables each, so a hundred thousand shlokas is about 1.8 million words of Sanskrit, some seven to ten times the combined length of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The actual count depends on which text is being counted. The two great manuscript families, the northern and the southern recensions, differ substantially, and popular printed editions such as the Kumbakonam and the Gita Press texts run near or above the traditional figure. The critical edition assembled at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute accepted only readings attested across the manuscript traditions, and the result is about 73,900 verses in eighteen parvas, with thousands more relegated to the appendices as demonstrably later material.

The epic itself reports intermediate sizes. It says Vyasa first made a core of twenty-four thousand verses, the Bharata proper, and that a summary of a hundred and fifty verses existed alongside it. It also gives verse counts book by book in its opening chapter, a table of contents that rarely matches the surviving books exactly, which is itself evidence of growth.

Within all of this, the Bhagavad Gita is seven hundred verses, spread over eighteen chapters inside the Bhishma Parva. The Harivamsa, a supplement on the life of Krishna treated as a nineteenth book, adds roughly sixteen thousand more verses beyond the hundred thousand.

So the precise answer is: about a hundred thousand verses in the traditional vulgate text, about seventy-four thousand in the reconstructed critical edition, and the difference between those two figures is a thousand years of retelling.