Linnet vs The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
576words between them — 2 min of it
Linnet is longer — 142,800 words against 142,224 for The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political, a difference of 576 words or about 2 min of extra reading. Linnet is the harder read, at grade 8.5 against 7.7.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Linnet | The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Allen, Grant | Lane, Franklin K. |
| Words | 142,800 | 142,224 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 9h 31m | 9h 29m |
| Unique words | 11,760 | 11,615 |
| Sentences | 7,123 | 8,464 |
| Average sentence length | 20 words | 16.8 words |
| Reading grade | 8.5 | 7.7 |
| Reading ease | 70 | 69.6 |
| Long words | 8.4% | 10.7% |
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 = |142,800 − 142,224| = 576 words 576 ÷ 250 wpm = 2 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Linnet or The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political?
Linnet is longer — 142,800 words against 142,224 for The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political, a difference of 576 words or about 2 min of extra reading. Linnet is the harder read, at grade 8.5 against 7.7.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 48296 and no. 4206 — 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.
