Roughing It vs The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 4
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
366words between them — 1 min of it
Roughing It is longer — 169,709 words against 169,343 for The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 4, a difference of 366 words or about 1 min of extra reading. Roughing It is the harder read, at grade 10.2 against 7.6.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Roughing It | The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Twain, Mark | Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron |
| Words | 169,709 | 169,343 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 11h 19m | 11h 17m |
| Unique words | 14,259 | 18,867 |
| Sentences | 7,077 | 9,602 |
| Average sentence length | 24 words | 17.6 words |
| Reading grade | 10.2 | 7.6 |
| Reading ease | 64.9 | 72.1 |
| Long words | 9% | 8.6% |
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 − 169,343| = 366 words 366 ÷ 250 wpm = 1 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Roughing It or The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 4?
Roughing It is longer — 169,709 words against 169,343 for The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 4, a difference of 366 words or about 1 min of extra reading. Roughing It is the harder read, at grade 10.2 against 7.6.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 3177 and no. 20158 — 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.
