Pride and Prejudice vs Don Juan
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
962words between them — 4 min of it
Pride and Prejudice is longer — 127,278 words against 126,316 for Don Juan, a difference of 962 words or about 4 min of extra reading. Don Juan is the harder read, at grade 15.4 against 9.8.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Pride and Prejudice | Don Juan | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Austen, Jane | Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron |
| Words | 127,278 | 126,316 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 8h 29m | 8h 25m |
| Unique words | 7,118 | 13,611 |
| Sentences | 5,942 | 3,178 |
| Average sentence length | 21.4 words | 39.7 words |
| Reading grade | 9.8 | 15.4 |
| Reading ease | 63.2 | 55.3 |
| Long words | 10.7% | 6.1% |
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 = |127,278 − 126,316| = 962 words 962 ÷ 250 wpm = 4 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Pride and Prejudice or Don Juan?
Pride and Prejudice is longer — 127,278 words against 126,316 for Don Juan, a difference of 962 words or about 4 min of extra reading. Don Juan is the harder read, at grade 15.4 against 9.8.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 1342 and no. 21700 — 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.
