How Big Could Harry Potter's World Possibly Be?

Earlier today, Google + member Amy Wan posted the following:

“I know this is a slightly less approached topic but: why are the wizarding wars called wars? I think that this is very much overstepping the definition of war especially because in the second war there was like 12-30 people on each side. That puts world wars into perspective doesn't it? You can argue that there are the giants as well but that's still a tiny amount. So all in all I think "war" is a much to delicate term for a few scuffles here and there.” (Amy Wan, Google +, Fandoms United Sept. 20th, 2016)

There were some back and forths in the comments section and I had a few points to plug in here and there, then I got to thinking about the scope of what she was talking about.  Voldemort was a villain known to the entire wizarding world.  They said that, in the books and the films…entire wizarding world.  Just how big could the wizarding world be?  Of course I took it too far!

Well, I think we need to kind of peel back some layers.  Amy has a point in saying that a conflict that small shouldn't necessarily be considered a "war", however I did some math on the matter.  J.K. Rowling says that there are about 1000 students attending Hogwarts at any given time.  Her words, so I'm going to take her as the definitive authority on the matter.  Now breaking that down between 4 houses is about 250 per house.  Hogwarts is massive so that’s not that hard to believe.  We only see the world from Harry's point of view so we really don't know what everyone else is doing, we don't know exactly how many "sub" teachers there are attending to everyone else.  And this isn't counting ghosts or magical creatures.  So 250 per house, broken down by 7 years is 35 students per grade level.  Each year brings in roughly 140 new students (35 per house across 4 houses) and sends off into the wizarding world approximately 140 graduating.  So all of this checks out given the size of the school we are dealing with

If Hogwarts is considered our control, that means that each of those thousand students has to have approximately 2 parents each, a mother and father, compensating for students who have multiple generations looking after them (grandparents, uncles and such living in the home) and those having no magical parents (muggle born) who may or may not be lumped into the wizarding community.  That gives us so far a population of 3000 just on parents and students currently attending Hogwarts, not counting the recently graduated, the childless, the unmarried, or those not yet old enough to attend Hogwarts.  Lets say that each family has roughly 2.5 kids, for kicks.  One graduated, one attending, and one not there yet.  So that compensates for the unmarried and the ones not in school, plus 2 parents.  2.5 also compensates for families like Draco's who only have one reported child (I don't think we ever heard of Draco having any siblings) because families like the Weasley's certainly make up the difference.  Remember nobody is shocked by the size of Ron's family so we can make a safe assumption that this isn't unusual.

Moving forward, that’s a population of 4500 wizards in Great Britain alone.

There are eight wizarding schools across the world, so that’s a very, very rough estimate of 36,000 living wizards across the world, probably a lot more than that if you factor in self-taught, and the undocumented and those in hiding.  Like I said, that’s not counting the magical creature community, which is probably at least that or higher.  Now we're not talking WWII level numbers here, but still nothing to sneeze at, especially if you considered parts of the non-wizarding world that got caught in the crossfire.  Remember the war spilled over and we are dealing with some serious power levels here.

A very special thanks to Amy Wan for inspiring this post, and to J.K. Rowling for giving us such a wealth of material to compulsively obsess over.