Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency — Complete vs The Rámáyan of Válmíki, translated into English verse
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
17,619words between them — 1h 10m of it
Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency — Complete is longer — 423,474 words against 405,855 for The Rámáyan of Válmíki, translated into English verse, a difference of 17,619 words or about 1h 10m of extra reading. Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency — Complete is the harder read, at grade 10.3 against 7.8.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency — Complete | The Rámáyan of Válmíki, translated into English verse | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, duc de | Valmiki |
| Words | 423,474 | 405,855 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 28h 14m | 27h 03m |
| Unique words | 14,859 | 16,900 |
| Sentences | 17,966 | 18,813 |
| Average sentence length | 23.6 words | 21.6 words |
| Reading grade | 10.3 | 7.8 |
| Reading ease | 63.2 | 77.8 |
| Long words | 9.5% | 4.4% |
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 = |423,474 − 405,855| = 17,619 words 17,619 ÷ 250 wpm = 1h 10m of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency — Complete or The Rámáyan of Válmíki, translated into English verse?
Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency — Complete is longer — 423,474 words against 405,855 for The Rámáyan of Válmíki, translated into English verse, a difference of 17,619 words or about 1h 10m of extra reading. Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency — Complete is the harder read, at grade 10.3 against 7.8.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 3875 and no. 24869 — 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.
