Notre-Dame de Paris vs Great Expectations
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
109words between them — 0 min of it
Notre-Dame de Paris is longer — 185,602 words against 185,493 for Great Expectations, a difference of 109 words or about 0 min of extra reading. Great Expectations is the harder read, at grade 9 against 9.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Notre-Dame de Paris | Great Expectations | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Hugo, Victor | Dickens, Charles |
| Words | 185,602 | 185,493 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 12h 22m | 12h 22m |
| Unique words | 14,100 | 11,364 |
| Sentences | 8,891 | 8,014 |
| Average sentence length | 20.9 words | 23.1 words |
| Reading grade | 9 | 9 |
| Reading ease | 67.4 | 71.6 |
| Long words | 8.9% | 6.9% |
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 = |185,602 − 185,493| = 109 words 109 ÷ 250 wpm = 0 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Notre-Dame de Paris or Great Expectations?
Notre-Dame de Paris is longer — 185,602 words against 185,493 for Great Expectations, a difference of 109 words or about 0 min of extra reading. Great Expectations is the harder read, at grade 9 against 9.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 2610 and no. 1400 — 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.
