Forest Days vs Complete Short Works of George Meredith
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
691words between them — 3 min of it
Forest Days is longer — 169,706 words against 169,015 for Complete Short Works of George Meredith, a difference of 691 words or about 3 min of extra reading. Forest Days is the harder read, at grade 14.1 against 8.3.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Forest Days | Complete Short Works of George Meredith | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | James, G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford) | Meredith, George |
| Words | 169,706 | 169,015 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 11h 19m | 11h 16m |
| Unique words | 10,568 | 15,714 |
| Sentences | 4,699 | 9,068 |
| Average sentence length | 36.1 words | 18.6 words |
| Reading grade | 14.1 | 8.3 |
| Reading ease | 58.1 | 68.6 |
| Long words | 6.5% | 9.7% |
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 = |169,706 − 169,015| = 691 words 691 ÷ 250 wpm = 3 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Forest Days or Complete Short Works of George Meredith?
Forest Days is longer — 169,706 words against 169,015 for Complete Short Works of George Meredith, a difference of 691 words or about 3 min of extra reading. Forest Days is the harder read, at grade 14.1 against 8.3.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 49987 and no. 4499 — 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.
