Italian Popular Tales vs Royal Edinburgh
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
1,597words between them — 6 min of it
Italian Popular Tales is longer — 160,193 words against 158,596 for Royal Edinburgh, a difference of 1,597 words or about 6 min of extra reading. Royal Edinburgh is the harder read, at grade 18 against 6.1.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Italian Popular Tales | Royal Edinburgh | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Crane, Thomas Frederick | Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret) |
| Words | 160,193 | 158,596 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 10h 41m | 10h 34m |
| Unique words | 9,103 | 13,239 |
| Sentences | 10,072 | 3,758 |
| Average sentence length | 15.9 words | 42.2 words |
| Reading grade | 6.1 | 18 |
| Reading ease | 79.5 | 41 |
| Long words | 6.5% | 11.3% |
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 = |160,193 − 158,596| = 1,597 words 1,597 ÷ 250 wpm = 6 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Italian Popular Tales or Royal Edinburgh?
Italian Popular Tales is longer — 160,193 words against 158,596 for Royal Edinburgh, a difference of 1,597 words or about 6 min of extra reading. Royal Edinburgh is the harder read, at grade 18 against 6.1.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 23634 and no. 25701 — 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.
