Middlemarch vs Eloisa
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
962words between them — 4 min of it
Middlemarch is longer — 318,545 words against 317,583 for Eloisa, a difference of 962 words or about 4 min of extra reading. Eloisa is the harder read, at grade 10.7 against 9.5.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Middlemarch | Eloisa | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Eliot, George | Rousseau, Jean-Jacques |
| Words | 318,545 | 317,583 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 21h 14m | 21h 10m |
| Unique words | 16,292 | 12,314 |
| Sentences | 14,565 | 13,134 |
| Average sentence length | 21.9 words | 24.2 words |
| Reading grade | 9.5 | 10.7 |
| Reading ease | 65.6 | 61.7 |
| Long words | 9.8% | 10.2% |
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 = |318,545 − 317,583| = 962 words 962 ÷ 250 wpm = 4 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Middlemarch or Eloisa?
Middlemarch is longer — 318,545 words against 317,583 for Eloisa, a difference of 962 words or about 4 min of extra reading. Eloisa is the harder read, at grade 10.7 against 9.5.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 145 and no. 76639 — 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.
