Eighty Years and More vs A guide to the history of physical education
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
328words between them — 1 min of it
Eighty Years and More is longer — 134,496 words against 134,168 for A guide to the history of physical education, a difference of 328 words or about 1 min of extra reading. A guide to the history of physical education is the harder read, at grade 12 against 11.1.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Eighty Years and More | A guide to the history of physical education | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Stanton, Elizabeth Cady | Leonard, Fred Eugene |
| Words | 134,496 | 134,168 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 8h 58m | 8h 57m |
| Unique words | 12,084 | 11,827 |
| Sentences | 5,645 | 6,055 |
| Average sentence length | 23.8 words | 22.2 words |
| Reading grade | 11.1 | 12 |
| Reading ease | 58 | 48.8 |
| Long words | 11.5% | 16.1% |
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 = |134,496 − 134,168| = 328 words 328 ÷ 250 wpm = 1 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Eighty Years and More or A guide to the history of physical education?
Eighty Years and More is longer — 134,496 words against 134,168 for A guide to the history of physical education, a difference of 328 words or about 1 min of extra reading. A guide to the history of physical education is the harder read, at grade 12 against 11.1.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 11982 and no. 78009 — 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.
