Little Women vs That Which Hath Wings
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
29words between them — 0 min of it
Little Women is longer — 186,262 words against 186,233 for That Which Hath Wings, a difference of 29 words or about 0 min of extra reading. Little Women is the harder read, at grade 9 against 8.4.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Little Women | That Which Hath Wings | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Alcott, Louisa May | Dehan, Richard |
| Words | 186,262 | 186,233 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 12h 25m | 12h 25m |
| Unique words | 11,102 | 18,946 |
| Sentences | 8,000 | 9,819 |
| Average sentence length | 23.3 words | 19 words |
| Reading grade | 9 | 8.4 |
| Reading ease | 72.2 | 68.9 |
| Long words | 6% | 8.7% |
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 = |186,262 − 186,233| = 29 words 29 ÷ 250 wpm = 0 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Little Women or That Which Hath Wings?
Little Women is longer — 186,262 words against 186,233 for That Which Hath Wings, a difference of 29 words or about 0 min of extra reading. Little Women is the harder read, at grade 9 against 8.4.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 514 and no. 51428 — 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.
