Chaucer's Works, Volume 3 — The House of Fame vs Boswell's Life of Johnson
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
2,625words between them — 11 min of it
Chaucer's Works, Volume 3 — The House of Fame is longer — 219,710 words against 217,085 for Boswell's Life of Johnson, a difference of 2,625 words or about 11 min of extra reading. Boswell's Life of Johnson is the harder read, at grade 9.6 against 3.9.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Chaucer's Works, Volume 3 — The House of Fame | Boswell's Life of Johnson | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Chaucer, Geoffrey | Boswell, James |
| Words | 219,710 | 217,085 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 14h 39m | 14h 28m |
| Unique words | 22,087 | 12,658 |
| Sentences | 27,205 | 10,001 |
| Average sentence length | 8.1 words | 21.7 words |
| Reading grade | 3.9 | 9.6 |
| Reading ease | 81.5 | 65.1 |
| Long words | 8.9% | 9.7% |
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 = |219,710 − 217,085| = 2,625 words 2,625 ÷ 250 wpm = 11 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Chaucer's Works, Volume 3 — The House of Fame or Boswell's Life of Johnson?
Chaucer's Works, Volume 3 — The House of Fame is longer — 219,710 words against 217,085 for Boswell's Life of Johnson, a difference of 2,625 words or about 11 min of extra reading. Boswell's Life of Johnson is the harder read, at grade 9.6 against 3.9.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 45027 and no. 1564 — 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.
