Desperate Remedies vs Blow The Man Down
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
189words between them — 1 min of it
Desperate Remedies is longer — 140,428 words against 140,239 for Blow The Man Down, a difference of 189 words or about 1 min of extra reading. Desperate Remedies is the harder read, at grade 8.9 against 6.5.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Desperate Remedies | Blow The Man Down | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Hardy, Thomas | Day, Holman |
| Words | 140,428 | 140,239 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 9h 22m | 9h 21m |
| Unique words | 11,745 | 11,364 |
| Sentences | 6,873 | 8,490 |
| Average sentence length | 20.4 words | 16.5 words |
| Reading grade | 8.9 | 6.5 |
| Reading ease | 67.8 | 77.9 |
| Long words | 9.1% | 6.4% |
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 = |140,428 − 140,239| = 189 words 189 ÷ 250 wpm = 1 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Desperate Remedies or Blow The Man Down?
Desperate Remedies is longer — 140,428 words against 140,239 for Blow The Man Down, a difference of 189 words or about 1 min of extra reading. Desperate Remedies is the harder read, at grade 8.9 against 6.5.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 3044 and no. 24793 — 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.
