Crime and Punishment vs The Real Adventure
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
1,250words between them — 5 min of it
Crime and Punishment is longer — 203,805 words against 202,555 for The Real Adventure, a difference of 1,250 words or about 5 min of extra reading. The Real Adventure is the harder read, at grade 8 against 6.8.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Crime and Punishment | The Real Adventure | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Dostoyevsky, Fyodor | Webster, Henry Kitchell |
| Words | 203,805 | 202,555 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 13h 35m | 13h 30m |
| Unique words | 10,258 | 13,514 |
| Sentences | 13,104 | 10,467 |
| Average sentence length | 15.6 words | 19.4 words |
| Reading grade | 6.8 | 8 |
| Reading ease | 73.9 | 71.9 |
| Long words | 9.1% | 8.2% |
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 = |203,805 − 202,555| = 1,250 words 1,250 ÷ 250 wpm = 5 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Crime and Punishment or The Real Adventure?
Crime and Punishment is longer — 203,805 words against 202,555 for The Real Adventure, a difference of 1,250 words or about 5 min of extra reading. The Real Adventure is the harder read, at grade 8 against 6.8.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 2554 and no. 15384 — 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.
