Emma vs Italian Popular Tales
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
361words between them — 1 min of it
Emma is longer — 160,554 words against 160,193 for Italian Popular Tales, a difference of 361 words or about 1 min of extra reading. Emma is the harder read, at grade 8.9 against 6.1.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Emma | Italian Popular Tales | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Austen, Jane | Crane, Thomas Frederick |
| Words | 160,554 | 160,193 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 10h 42m | 10h 41m |
| Unique words | 7,331 | 9,103 |
| Sentences | 7,684 | 10,072 |
| Average sentence length | 20.9 words | 15.9 words |
| Reading grade | 8.9 | 6.1 |
| Reading ease | 68.6 | 79.5 |
| Long words | 8.3% | 6.5% |
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 = |160,554 − 160,193| = 361 words 361 ÷ 250 wpm = 1 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Emma or Italian Popular Tales?
Emma is longer — 160,554 words against 160,193 for Italian Popular Tales, a difference of 361 words or about 1 min of extra reading. Emma is the harder read, at grade 8.9 against 6.1.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 158 and no. 23634 — 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.
