My Life — Volume 1 vs Chaucer's Works, Volume 3 — The House of Fame
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
391words between them — 2 min of it
My Life — Volume 1 is longer — 220,101 words against 219,710 for Chaucer's Works, Volume 3 — The House of Fame, a difference of 391 words or about 2 min of extra reading. My Life — Volume 1 is the harder read, at grade 14.7 against 3.9.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| My Life — Volume 1 | Chaucer's Works, Volume 3 — The House of Fame | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Wagner, Richard | Chaucer, Geoffrey |
| Words | 220,101 | 219,710 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 14h 40m | 14h 39m |
| Unique words | 13,674 | 22,087 |
| Sentences | 6,740 | 27,205 |
| Average sentence length | 32.7 words | 8.1 words |
| Reading grade | 14.7 | 3.9 |
| Reading ease | 47.5 | 81.5 |
| Long words | 12.7% | 8.9% |
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 = |220,101 − 219,710| = 391 words 391 ÷ 250 wpm = 2 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, My Life — Volume 1 or Chaucer's Works, Volume 3 — The House of Fame?
My Life — Volume 1 is longer — 220,101 words against 219,710 for Chaucer's Works, Volume 3 — The House of Fame, a difference of 391 words or about 2 min of extra reading. My Life — Volume 1 is the harder read, at grade 14.7 against 3.9.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 5197 and no. 45027 — 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.
