A Tale of Two Cities vs The Samurai Strategy
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
185words between them — 1 min of it
A Tale of Two Cities is longer — 135,996 words against 135,811 for The Samurai Strategy, a difference of 185 words or about 1 min of extra reading. A Tale of Two Cities is the harder read, at grade 8.9 against 6.9.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| A Tale of Two Cities | The Samurai Strategy | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Dickens, Charles | Hoover, Thomas |
| Words | 135,996 | 135,811 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 9h 04m | 9h 03m |
| Unique words | 10,649 | 13,038 |
| Sentences | 6,255 | 9,629 |
| Average sentence length | 21.7 words | 14.1 words |
| Reading grade | 8.9 | 6.9 |
| Reading ease | 69.8 | 70.5 |
| Long words | 7.6% | 10.8% |
Highlighted cells are the larger figure — except reading ease, where higher means easier.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions, same counting rule·REVIEWED JUL 2026
How this is worked out
- Both texts are counted the same way, from the same source, with Gutenberg's header and licence footer struck first.
- The gap is stated in words and then in time at 250 words a minute — the rate is printed because a duration without one cannot be checked.
- Difficulty is compared on Flesch–Kincaid grade, which reads sentence and word length only. It cannot see irony or dialect, so treat it as a measure of surface, not of effort.
gap = |135,996 − 135,811| = 185 words 185 ÷ 250 wpm = 1 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, A Tale of Two Cities or The Samurai Strategy?
A Tale of Two Cities is longer — 135,996 words against 135,811 for The Samurai Strategy, a difference of 185 words or about 1 min of extra reading. A Tale of Two Cities is the harder read, at grade 8.9 against 6.9.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 98 and no. 34323 — and from no other source. Neither book’s text is set on this site.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·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.
