Chaucer's Works, Volume 2 — Boethius and Troilus vs Crime and Punishment
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
1,968words between them — 8 min of it
Chaucer's Works, Volume 2 — Boethius and Troilus is longer — 205,773 words against 203,805 for Crime and Punishment, a difference of 1,968 words or about 8 min of extra reading. Crime and Punishment is the harder read, at grade 6.8 against 2.3.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Chaucer's Works, Volume 2 — Boethius and Troilus | Crime and Punishment | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Chaucer, Geoffrey | Dostoyevsky, Fyodor |
| Words | 205,773 | 203,805 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 13h 43m | 13h 35m |
| Unique words | 21,237 | 10,258 |
| Sentences | 36,000 | 13,104 |
| Average sentence length | 5.7 words | 15.6 words |
| Reading grade | 2.3 | 6.8 |
| Reading ease | 88.6 | 73.9 |
| Long words | 7.4% | 9.1% |
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 = |205,773 − 203,805| = 1,968 words 1,968 ÷ 250 wpm = 8 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Chaucer's Works, Volume 2 — Boethius and Troilus or Crime and Punishment?
Chaucer's Works, Volume 2 — Boethius and Troilus is longer — 205,773 words against 203,805 for Crime and Punishment, a difference of 1,968 words or about 8 min of extra reading. Crime and Punishment is the harder read, at grade 6.8 against 2.3.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 44833 and no. 2554 — 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.
