Fifty Years In The Northwest vs The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
5,368words between them — 21 min of it
Fifty Years In The Northwest is longer — 282,104 words against 276,736 for The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems, a difference of 5,368 words or about 21 min of extra reading. The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems is the harder read, at grade 12.4 against 6.2.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Fifty Years In The Northwest | The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Folsom, William H. C. (William Henry Carman) | Chaucer, Geoffrey |
| Words | 282,104 | 276,736 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 18h 48m | 18h 27m |
| Unique words | 14,812 | 18,527 |
| Sentences | 26,811 | 8,546 |
| Average sentence length | 10.5 words | 32.4 words |
| Reading grade | 6.2 | 12.4 |
| Reading ease | 69.4 | 63.7 |
| Long words | 12% | 6.3% |
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 = |282,104 − 276,736| = 5,368 words 5,368 ÷ 250 wpm = 21 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Fifty Years In The Northwest or The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems?
Fifty Years In The Northwest is longer — 282,104 words against 276,736 for The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems, a difference of 5,368 words or about 21 min of extra reading. The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems is the harder read, at grade 12.4 against 6.2.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 36375 and no. 2383 — 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.
