Crime and Punishment vs Thelma
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
713words between them — 3 min of it
Crime and Punishment is longer — 203,805 words against 203,092 for Thelma, a difference of 713 words or about 3 min of extra reading. Thelma is the harder read, at grade 8.7 against 6.8.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Crime and Punishment | Thelma | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Dostoyevsky, Fyodor | Corelli, Marie |
| Words | 203,805 | 203,092 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 13h 35m | 13h 32m |
| Unique words | 10,258 | 15,626 |
| Sentences | 13,104 | 10,148 |
| Average sentence length | 15.6 words | 20 words |
| Reading grade | 6.8 | 8.7 |
| Reading ease | 73.9 | 68 |
| Long words | 9.1% | 9.3% |
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 − 203,092| = 713 words 713 ÷ 250 wpm = 3 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Crime and Punishment or Thelma?
Crime and Punishment is longer — 203,805 words against 203,092 for Thelma, a difference of 713 words or about 3 min of extra reading. Thelma is the harder read, at grade 8.7 against 6.8.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 2554 and no. 3823 — 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.
