Part of the data ring
ReadLength
Two extents, one measure

Blow The Man Down vs Weird Tales, Volume 1, Number 4, June, 1923

Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.

Blow The Man Down

140,239
words · 9h 21m
Longer
vs

124words between them — 0 min of it

Blow The Man Down is longer — 140,239 words against 140,115 for Weird Tales, Volume 1, Number 4, June, 1923, a difference of 124 words or about 0 min of extra reading. Weird Tales, Volume 1, Number 4, June, 1923 is the harder read, at grade 7.3 against 6.5.

SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026

Side by side

Blow The Man DownWeird Tales, Volume 1, Number 4, June, 1923
AuthorDay, HolmanVarious
Words 140,239 140,115
Reading time at 250 wpm 9h 21m 9h 20m
Unique words 11,364 12,686
Sentences 8,490 8,333
Average sentence length 16.5 words 16.8 words
Reading grade 6.5 7.3
Reading ease 77.9 72.8
Long words 6.4% 8.6%

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

  1. Both texts are counted the same way, from the same source, with Gutenberg's header and licence footer struck first.
  2. 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.
  3. 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 = |140,239 − 140,115| = 124 words
124 ÷ 250 wpm = 0 min of extra reading

Full methodology →

The second question

Which is longer, Blow The Man Down or Weird Tales, Volume 1, Number 4, June, 1923?

Blow The Man Down is longer — 140,239 words against 140,115 for Weird Tales, Volume 1, Number 4, June, 1923, a difference of 124 words or about 0 min of extra reading. Weird Tales, Volume 1, Number 4, June, 1923 is the harder read, at grade 7.3 against 6.5.

Colophon

Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 24793 and no. 69608 — 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.

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Amit Sharma

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