Plutarch's Morals vs The War in the Air
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
327words between them — 1 min of it
Plutarch's Morals is longer — 156,952 words against 156,625 for The War in the Air, a difference of 327 words or about 1 min of extra reading. Plutarch's Morals is the harder read, at grade 11.6 against 9.4.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Plutarch's Morals | The War in the Air | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Plutarch | Raleigh, Walter Alexander, Sir |
| Words | 156,952 | 156,625 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 10h 28m | 10h 27m |
| Unique words | 13,315 | 10,870 |
| Sentences | 5,944 | 8,228 |
| Average sentence length | 26.4 words | 19 words |
| Reading grade | 11.6 | 9.4 |
| Reading ease | 58.9 | 61.4 |
| Long words | 10.5% | 12.1% |
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 = |156,952 − 156,625| = 327 words 327 ÷ 250 wpm = 1 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Plutarch's Morals or The War in the Air?
Plutarch's Morals is longer — 156,952 words against 156,625 for The War in the Air, a difference of 327 words or about 1 min of extra reading. Plutarch's Morals is the harder read, at grade 11.6 against 9.4.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 23639 and no. 28226 — 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.
