Little Women vs Notre-Dame de Paris
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
660words between them — 3 min of it
Little Women is longer — 186,262 words against 185,602 for Notre-Dame de Paris, a difference of 660 words or about 3 min of extra reading. Notre-Dame de Paris is the harder read, at grade 9 against 9.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Little Women | Notre-Dame de Paris | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Alcott, Louisa May | Hugo, Victor |
| Words | 186,262 | 185,602 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 12h 25m | 12h 22m |
| Unique words | 11,102 | 14,100 |
| Sentences | 8,000 | 8,891 |
| Average sentence length | 23.3 words | 20.9 words |
| Reading grade | 9 | 9 |
| Reading ease | 72.2 | 67.4 |
| Long words | 6% | 8.9% |
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 = |186,262 − 185,602| = 660 words 660 ÷ 250 wpm = 3 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Little Women or Notre-Dame de Paris?
Little Women is longer — 186,262 words against 185,602 for Notre-Dame de Paris, a difference of 660 words or about 3 min of extra reading. Notre-Dame de Paris is the harder read, at grade 9 against 9.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 514 and no. 2610 — 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.
