Don Juan vs The rose of old St. Louis
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
245words between them — 1 min of it
Don Juan is longer — 126,316 words against 126,071 for The rose of old St. Louis, a difference of 245 words or about 1 min of extra reading. Don Juan is the harder read, at grade 15.4 against 11.3.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Don Juan | The rose of old St. Louis | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron | Dillon, Mary (Mary C. Johnson) |
| Words | 126,316 | 126,071 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 8h 25m | 8h 24m |
| Unique words | 13,611 | 9,826 |
| Sentences | 3,178 | 4,533 |
| Average sentence length | 39.7 words | 27.8 words |
| Reading grade | 15.4 | 11.3 |
| Reading ease | 55.3 | 63.6 |
| Long words | 6.1% | 7.8% |
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 = |126,316 − 126,071| = 245 words 245 ÷ 250 wpm = 1 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Don Juan or The rose of old St. Louis?
Don Juan is longer — 126,316 words against 126,071 for The rose of old St. Louis, a difference of 245 words or about 1 min of extra reading. Don Juan is the harder read, at grade 15.4 against 11.3.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 21700 and no. 20911 — 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.
