Boswell's Life of Johnson vs The Republic
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
297words between them — 1 min of it
Boswell's Life of Johnson is longer — 217,085 words against 216,788 for The Republic, a difference of 297 words or about 1 min of extra reading. The Republic is the harder read, at grade 11 against 9.6.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Boswell's Life of Johnson | The Republic | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Boswell, James | Plato |
| Words | 217,085 | 216,788 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 14h 28m | 14h 27m |
| Unique words | 12,658 | 10,436 |
| Sentences | 10,001 | 8,557 |
| Average sentence length | 21.7 words | 25.3 words |
| Reading grade | 9.6 | 11 |
| Reading ease | 65.1 | 61.3 |
| Long words | 9.7% | 10.2% |
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 = |217,085 − 216,788| = 297 words 297 ÷ 250 wpm = 1 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Boswell's Life of Johnson or The Republic?
Boswell's Life of Johnson is longer — 217,085 words against 216,788 for The Republic, a difference of 297 words or about 1 min of extra reading. The Republic is the harder read, at grade 11 against 9.6.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 1564 and no. 1497 — 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.
