Audubon the Naturalist vs The Canadian Portrait Gallery - Volume 3 (of 4)
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
283words between them — 1 min of it
Audubon the Naturalist is longer — 143,370 words against 143,087 for The Canadian Portrait Gallery - Volume 3 (of 4), a difference of 283 words or about 1 min of extra reading. The Canadian Portrait Gallery - Volume 3 (of 4) is the harder read, at grade 10.9 against 8.3.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Audubon the Naturalist | The Canadian Portrait Gallery - Volume 3 (of 4) | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Herrick, Francis Hobart | Dent, John Charles |
| Words | 143,370 | 143,087 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 9h 33m | 9h 32m |
| Unique words | 12,310 | 11,473 |
| Sentences | 9,142 | 6,912 |
| Average sentence length | 15.7 words | 20.7 words |
| Reading grade | 8.3 | 10.9 |
| Reading ease | 63.4 | 53.5 |
| Long words | 13.5% | 15% |
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 = |143,370 − 143,087| = 283 words 283 ÷ 250 wpm = 1 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Audubon the Naturalist or The Canadian Portrait Gallery - Volume 3 (of 4)?
Audubon the Naturalist is longer — 143,370 words against 143,087 for The Canadian Portrait Gallery - Volume 3 (of 4), a difference of 283 words or about 1 min of extra reading. The Canadian Portrait Gallery - Volume 3 (of 4) is the harder read, at grade 10.9 against 8.3.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 58984 and no. 35647 — 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.
