Manual of Surgery Volume Second vs Chaucer's Works, Volume 2 — Boethius and Troilus
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
5,263words between them — 21 min of it
Manual of Surgery Volume Second is longer — 211,036 words against 205,773 for Chaucer's Works, Volume 2 — Boethius and Troilus, a difference of 5,263 words or about 21 min of extra reading. Manual of Surgery Volume Second is the harder read, at grade 12.7 against 2.3.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Manual of Surgery Volume Second | Chaucer's Works, Volume 2 — Boethius and Troilus | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Thomson, Alexis | Chaucer, Geoffrey |
| Words | 211,036 | 205,773 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 14h 04m | 13h 43m |
| Unique words | 9,596 | 21,237 |
| Sentences | 9,131 | 36,000 |
| Average sentence length | 23.1 words | 5.7 words |
| Reading grade | 12.7 | 2.3 |
| Reading ease | 45.1 | 88.6 |
| Long words | 17.1% | 7.4% |
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 = |211,036 − 205,773| = 5,263 words 5,263 ÷ 250 wpm = 21 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Manual of Surgery Volume Second or Chaucer's Works, Volume 2 — Boethius and Troilus?
Manual of Surgery Volume Second is longer — 211,036 words against 205,773 for Chaucer's Works, Volume 2 — Boethius and Troilus, a difference of 5,263 words or about 21 min of extra reading. Manual of Surgery Volume Second is the harder read, at grade 12.7 against 2.3.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 28428 and no. 44833 — 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.
