Les Misérables vs Antiquities of the Jews
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
26,556words between them — 1h 46m of it
Les Misérables is longer — 567,924 words against 541,368 for Antiquities of the Jews, a difference of 26,556 words or about 1h 46m of extra reading. Antiquities of the Jews is the harder read, at grade 16 against 8.1.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Les Misérables | Antiquities of the Jews | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Hugo, Victor | Josephus, Flavius |
| Words | 567,924 | 541,368 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 37h 52m | 36h 05m |
| Unique words | 24,214 | 13,369 |
| Sentences | 30,777 | 13,871 |
| Average sentence length | 18.5 words | 39 words |
| Reading grade | 8.1 | 16 |
| Reading ease | 69.7 | 49.6 |
| Long words | 9.1% | 9% |
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 = |567,924 − 541,368| = 26,556 words 26,556 ÷ 250 wpm = 1h 46m of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Les Misérables or Antiquities of the Jews?
Les Misérables is longer — 567,924 words against 541,368 for Antiquities of the Jews, a difference of 26,556 words or about 1h 46m of extra reading. Antiquities of the Jews is the harder read, at grade 16 against 8.1.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 135 and no. 2848 — 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.
