Life of St. Francis of Assisi vs Under the Red Dragon
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
482words between them — 2 min of it
Life of St. Francis of Assisi is longer — 151,759 words against 151,277 for Under the Red Dragon, a difference of 482 words or about 2 min of extra reading. Under the Red Dragon is the harder read, at grade 15.5 against 9.3.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Life of St. Francis of Assisi | Under the Red Dragon | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Sabatier, Paul | Grant, James |
| Words | 151,759 | 151,277 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 10h 07m | 10h 05m |
| Unique words | 13,781 | 14,816 |
| Sentences | 8,218 | 4,070 |
| Average sentence length | 18.5 words | 37.2 words |
| Reading grade | 9.3 | 15.5 |
| Reading ease | 61.6 | 50.2 |
| Long words | 12.7% | 9.3% |
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 = |151,759 − 151,277| = 482 words 482 ÷ 250 wpm = 2 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Life of St. Francis of Assisi or Under the Red Dragon?
Life of St. Francis of Assisi is longer — 151,759 words against 151,277 for Under the Red Dragon, a difference of 482 words or about 2 min of extra reading. Under the Red Dragon is the harder read, at grade 15.5 against 9.3.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 18787 and no. 53874 — 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.
