Gargantua and Pantagruel vs Middlemarch
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
1,376words between them — 6 min of it
Gargantua and Pantagruel is longer — 319,921 words against 318,545 for Middlemarch, a difference of 1,376 words or about 6 min of extra reading. Gargantua and Pantagruel is the harder read, at grade 9.7 against 9.5.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Gargantua and Pantagruel | Middlemarch | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Rabelais, François | Eliot, George |
| Words | 319,921 | 318,545 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 21h 20m | 21h 14m |
| Unique words | 27,351 | 16,292 |
| Sentences | 14,290 | 14,565 |
| Average sentence length | 22.4 words | 21.9 words |
| Reading grade | 9.7 | 9.5 |
| Reading ease | 65.1 | 65.6 |
| Long words | 9.6% | 9.8% |
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 = |319,921 − 318,545| = 1,376 words 1,376 ÷ 250 wpm = 6 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Gargantua and Pantagruel or Middlemarch?
Gargantua and Pantagruel is longer — 319,921 words against 318,545 for Middlemarch, a difference of 1,376 words or about 6 min of extra reading. Gargantua and Pantagruel is the harder read, at grade 9.7 against 9.5.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 1200 and no. 145 — 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.
