Roughing It vs Forest Days
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
3words between them — 0 min of it
Roughing It is longer — 169,709 words against 169,706 for Forest Days, a difference of 3 words or about 0 min of extra reading. Forest Days is the harder read, at grade 14.1 against 10.2.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Roughing It | Forest Days | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Twain, Mark | James, G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford) |
| Words | 169,709 | 169,706 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 11h 19m | 11h 19m |
| Unique words | 14,259 | 10,568 |
| Sentences | 7,077 | 4,699 |
| Average sentence length | 24 words | 36.1 words |
| Reading grade | 10.2 | 14.1 |
| Reading ease | 64.9 | 58.1 |
| Long words | 9% | 6.5% |
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 = |169,709 − 169,706| = 3 words 3 ÷ 250 wpm = 0 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Roughing It or Forest Days?
Roughing It is longer — 169,709 words against 169,706 for Forest Days, a difference of 3 words or about 0 min of extra reading. Forest Days is the harder read, at grade 14.1 against 10.2.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 3177 and no. 49987 — 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.
