Dracula vs Emma
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
163words between them — 1 min of it
Dracula is longer — 160,717 words against 160,554 for Emma, a difference of 163 words or about 1 min of extra reading. Emma is the harder read, at grade 8.9 against 7.5.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Dracula | Emma | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Stoker, Bram | Austen, Jane |
| Words | 160,717 | 160,554 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 10h 43m | 10h 42m |
| Unique words | 10,254 | 7,331 |
| Sentences | 7,839 | 7,684 |
| Average sentence length | 20.5 words | 20.9 words |
| Reading grade | 7.5 | 8.9 |
| Reading ease | 77.8 | 68.6 |
| Long words | 5.5% | 8.3% |
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 = |160,717 − 160,554| = 163 words 163 ÷ 250 wpm = 1 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Dracula or Emma?
Dracula is longer — 160,717 words against 160,554 for Emma, a difference of 163 words or about 1 min of extra reading. Emma is the harder read, at grade 8.9 against 7.5.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 345 and no. 158 — 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.
