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Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, duc de · d. 1755 · measured edition

Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency — Complete

28h 14mof reading at 250 wpm

Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency — Complete by Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, duc de runs to 423,474 words — about 28h 14m of reading at an average adult pace of 250 words per minute, or roughly 1,540 pages at typical paperback density.

Extent 423,474 words · 14,859 distinct forms · 17,966 sentences · F–K grade 10.3

SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·computed from the full text·REVIEWED JUL 2026

Extent — 1,540 pages against 28h 14m of reading

Above the rule one mark per reading hour at 250 wpmBelow a folio every 50 pages at 275 words to the page

SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·counted from the text, not a publisher's page count·REVIEWED JUL 2026

Words423,474longer than 97% of books here
Reading time28h 14mat 250 wpm
Reading level10.3Flesch–Kincaid grade
Chapters1193,559 words each

How this is worked out

  1. The Project Gutenberg plain-text edition is fetched, then Gutenberg's header and licence footer are struck at the *** START *** and *** END *** markers. Nothing is taken from a publisher's listing.
  2. What remains is counted as that edition sets it: 423,474 words, 17,966 sentences, syllables by vowel-group heuristic.
  3. Words are divided by a stated reading rate. This page's headline uses 250 words a minute; a duration printed without its rate cannot be checked, so the rate travels with every figure and the table below runs 150–450 wpm.
  4. Minutes are rounded once, to the nearest minute, and set as h:mm. Nothing on this page is rounded twice.
  5. The page extent is a courtesy conversion at 275 words to the page — a typesetting figure, not a property of the book.
words ÷ rate            = minutes
423,474 ÷ 250 wpm   = 1694 min   → 28h 14m
words ÷ density         = extent
423,474 ÷ 275 w/pp  = 1,540 pages

The method in full, including why your count may differ →

How long it takes to read, by reading speed

Most adults read prose at 200–300 words per minute. Reading speed varies far more between people than most reading-time estimates admit, so here is the whole range.

Reading speedTotal timeAt 30 min/dayAt 1 hour/day
Slow / careful (150 wpm) 47h 03m95 days48 days
Below average (200 wpm) 35h 17m71 days36 days
Average adult (250 wpm) 28h 14m57 days29 days
Fast (300 wpm) 23h 32m48 days24 days
Very fast (450 wpm) 15h 41m32 days16 days

The full measurement

Total words423,474
Unique words14,859
Lexical diversity3.51% unique words as a share of total
Sentences17,966
Average sentence length23.6 words
Average syllables per word1.41
Long words (3+ syllables)9.5%
Chapters detected119 — averaging 3,559 words
Flesch–Kincaid grade10.3
Flesch reading ease63.2 higher is easier; 60–70 is plain English
Gunning fog index13.2
Coleman–Liau index9

Computed from the Project Gutenberg plain-text edition with the Gutenberg header and licence footer removed. See how and why your count may differ.

SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·ebook no. 3875·REVIEWED JUL 2026

Reading it in evenings

The same 423,474 words, divided by the habit rather than by the hour — and then a rate of your own, if 250 wpm is not yours.

10 min a day 170 days
20 min a day 85 days
30 min a day 57 days
60 min a day 29 days
Worked from the text: 423,474 words ÷ 250 words per minute = 1694 minutes of reading, divided by the daily habit and rounded up to whole days.

SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·reading rate stated: 250 wpm·REVIEWED JUL 2026

Average adult prose speed is 200–300 wpm. Not sure? Time yourself on one page.

Is it a hard read?

Four different readability formulas agree it is demanding — high school level: Flesch–Kincaid puts it at grade 10.3, Gunning fog at 13.2, Coleman–Liau at 9. The Flesch reading-ease score of 63.2 is fairly typical of adult fiction.

The mechanics behind that: sentences average 23.6 words (modern prose tends to run 15–20), and 9.5% of words are three syllables or longer. Its vocabulary is fairly repetitive — 14,859 distinct words, or 3.51% of the total.

A caution about all of this: readability formulas measure sentence and word length, nothing more. They cannot see irony, dialect, allusion or an unreliable narrator. A book can score as "easy" and still be genuinely difficult to follow.

The second question

What people ask once the duration is on the table.

How many words are in Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency — Complete?

423,474 words in the Project Gutenberg edition, made up of 14,859 distinct words across 17,966 sentences. That is longer than 97% of the books measured on this site.

How long does it take to read Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency — Complete?

About 28h 14m at an average adult reading speed of 250 words per minute. A slower reader at 150 wpm would need roughly 47h 03m; a fast reader at 400 wpm about 17h 39m.

What reading level is Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency — Complete?

It scores 10.3 on the Flesch–Kincaid grade scale — demanding — high school level. Its Flesch reading-ease score is 63.2, sentences average 23.6 words, and 9.5% of its words run to three syllables or more.

How many pages is Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency — Complete?

Page counts depend entirely on the edition — font, trim size and margins all change them, which is why this site measures words instead. At a typical trade-paperback density of about 275 words per page, 423,474 words works out to roughly 1,540 pages.

Colophon

Measured from the Project Gutenberg plain-text edition, ebook no. 3875, with Gutenberg’s header and licence footer struck before counting. 423,474 words, 17,966 sentences, 14,859 distinct forms. No text of the work is set anywhere on this site — only measurements of it.

The extent of 1,540 pages is a conversion at 275 words to the page, not this edition’s foliation: a page count belongs to a typesetting, never to a book. Reading time assumes 250 words a minute and is stated with its rate everywhere it appears.

SOURCE·Project Gutenberg ebook no. 3875·US public domain·REVIEWED JUL 2026

Word counts and reading levels are computed from a specific public-domain edition and will differ from other editions and from other counting methods — see the method page.

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