Audubon the Naturalist vs The Raft
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
333words between them — 1 min of it
Audubon the Naturalist is longer — 143,370 words against 143,037 for The Raft, a difference of 333 words or about 1 min of extra reading. Audubon the Naturalist is the harder read, at grade 8.3 against 5.2.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Audubon the Naturalist | The Raft | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Herrick, Francis Hobart | Dawson, Coningsby |
| Words | 143,370 | 143,037 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 9h 33m | 9h 32m |
| Unique words | 12,310 | 11,795 |
| Sentences | 9,142 | 10,797 |
| Average sentence length | 15.7 words | 13.2 words |
| Reading grade | 8.3 | 5.2 |
| Reading ease | 63.4 | 81 |
| Long words | 13.5% | 6.1% |
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 − 143,037| = 333 words 333 ÷ 250 wpm = 1 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Audubon the Naturalist or The Raft?
Audubon the Naturalist is longer — 143,370 words against 143,037 for The Raft, a difference of 333 words or about 1 min of extra reading. Audubon the Naturalist is the harder read, at grade 8.3 against 5.2.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 58984 and no. 50498 — 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.
