Lord Milner's Work in South Africa vs Memoirs of the Court of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, Complete
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
469words between them — 2 min of it
Lord Milner's Work in South Africa is longer — 161,551 words against 161,082 for Memoirs of the Court of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, Complete, a difference of 469 words or about 2 min of extra reading. Lord Milner's Work in South Africa is the harder read, at grade 13.8 against 12.1.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Lord Milner's Work in South Africa | Memoirs of the Court of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, Complete | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Worsfold, W. Basil (William Basil) | Campan, Mme. (Jeanne-Louise-Henriette) |
| Words | 161,551 | 161,082 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 10h 46m | 10h 44m |
| Unique words | 9,783 | 10,776 |
| Sentences | 5,915 | 5,915 |
| Average sentence length | 27.3 words | 27.2 words |
| Reading grade | 13.8 | 12.1 |
| Reading ease | 44.4 | 56.6 |
| Long words | 17% | 11% |
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 = |161,551 − 161,082| = 469 words 469 ÷ 250 wpm = 2 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Lord Milner's Work in South Africa or Memoirs of the Court of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, Complete?
Lord Milner's Work in South Africa is longer — 161,551 words against 161,082 for Memoirs of the Court of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, Complete, a difference of 469 words or about 2 min of extra reading. Lord Milner's Work in South Africa is the harder read, at grade 13.8 against 12.1.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 26490 and no. 3891 — 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.
