Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1 vs Little Women
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
423words between them — 2 min of it
Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1 is longer — 192,896 words against 192,473 for Little Women, a difference of 423 words or about 2 min of extra reading. Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1 is the harder read, at grade 10.4 against 9.8.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1 | Little Women | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Darwin, Charles | Alcott, Louisa May |
| Words | 192,896 | 192,473 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 12h 52m | 12h 50m |
| Unique words | 12,375 | 11,756 |
| Sentences | 8,357 | 7,610 |
| Average sentence length | 23.1 words | 25.3 words |
| Reading grade | 10.4 | 9.8 |
| Reading ease | 61.5 | 69.6 |
| Long words | 10.7% | 6.3% |
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 = |192,896 − 192,473| = 423 words 423 ÷ 250 wpm = 2 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1 or Little Women?
Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1 is longer — 192,896 words against 192,473 for Little Women, a difference of 423 words or about 2 min of extra reading. Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1 is the harder read, at grade 10.4 against 9.8.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 2087 and no. 37106 — 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.
