Sketches of Successful New Hampshire Men vs Roughing It
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
599words between them — 2 min of it
Sketches of Successful New Hampshire Men is longer — 170,308 words against 169,709 for Roughing It, a difference of 599 words or about 2 min of extra reading. Roughing It is the harder read, at grade 10.2 against 9.8.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Sketches of Successful New Hampshire Men | Roughing It | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Various | Twain, Mark |
| Words | 170,308 | 169,709 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 11h 21m | 11h 19m |
| Unique words | 11,109 | 14,259 |
| Sentences | 9,371 | 7,077 |
| Average sentence length | 18.2 words | 24 words |
| Reading grade | 9.8 | 10.2 |
| Reading ease | 56.9 | 64.9 |
| Long words | 14.6% | 9% |
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 = |170,308 − 169,709| = 599 words 599 ÷ 250 wpm = 2 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Sketches of Successful New Hampshire Men or Roughing It?
Sketches of Successful New Hampshire Men is longer — 170,308 words against 169,709 for Roughing It, a difference of 599 words or about 2 min of extra reading. Roughing It is the harder read, at grade 10.2 against 9.8.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 39634 and no. 3177 — 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.
