Paul Clifford — Complete vs The Home Book of Verse — Volume 2
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
1,443words between them — 6 min of it
Paul Clifford — Complete is longer — 180,846 words against 179,403 for The Home Book of Verse — Volume 2, a difference of 1,443 words or about 6 min of extra reading. Paul Clifford — Complete is the harder read, at grade 12.2 against 8.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Paul Clifford — Complete | The Home Book of Verse — Volume 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron | Stevenson, Burton Egbert |
| Words | 180,846 | 179,403 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 12h 03m | 11h 58m |
| Unique words | 14,759 | 14,122 |
| Sentences | 6,427 | 7,781 |
| Average sentence length | 28.1 words | 23.1 words |
| Reading grade | 12.2 | 8 |
| Reading ease | 57.4 | 78.9 |
| Long words | 10.2% | 3.4% |
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 = |180,846 − 179,403| = 1,443 words 1,443 ÷ 250 wpm = 6 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Paul Clifford — Complete or The Home Book of Verse — Volume 2?
Paul Clifford — Complete is longer — 180,846 words against 179,403 for The Home Book of Verse — Volume 2, a difference of 1,443 words or about 6 min of extra reading. Paul Clifford — Complete is the harder read, at grade 12.2 against 8.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 7735 and no. 2620 — 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.
