Jane Eyre vs Little Women
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
1,114words between them — 4 min of it
Jane Eyre is longer — 187,376 words against 186,262 for Little Women, a difference of 1,114 words or about 4 min of extra reading. Jane Eyre is the harder read, at grade 9.7 against 9.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Jane Eyre | Little Women | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Brontë, Charlotte | Alcott, Louisa May |
| Words | 187,376 | 186,262 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 12h 30m | 12h 25m |
| Unique words | 13,260 | 11,102 |
| Sentences | 7,722 | 8,000 |
| Average sentence length | 24.3 words | 23.3 words |
| Reading grade | 9.7 | 9 |
| Reading ease | 68.5 | 72.2 |
| Long words | 7.5% | 6% |
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 = |187,376 − 186,262| = 1,114 words 1,114 ÷ 250 wpm = 4 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Jane Eyre or Little Women?
Jane Eyre is longer — 187,376 words against 186,262 for Little Women, a difference of 1,114 words or about 4 min of extra reading. Jane Eyre is the harder read, at grade 9.7 against 9.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 1260 and no. 514 — 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.
