The Black Hawk War Including a Review of Black Hawk's Life vs Lady Audley's Secret
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
871words between them — 3 min of it
The Black Hawk War Including a Review of Black Hawk's Life is longer — 150,493 words against 149,622 for Lady Audley's Secret, a difference of 871 words or about 3 min of extra reading. Lady Audley's Secret is the harder read, at grade 10 against 8.6.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| The Black Hawk War Including a Review of Black Hawk's Life | Lady Audley's Secret | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Stevens, Frank Everett | Braddon, M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) |
| Words | 150,493 | 149,622 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 10h 02m | 9h 58m |
| Unique words | 10,472 | 10,726 |
| Sentences | 8,762 | 6,263 |
| Average sentence length | 17.2 words | 23.9 words |
| Reading grade | 8.6 | 10 |
| Reading ease | 64.1 | 66.2 |
| Long words | 11.4% | 7.6% |
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 = |150,493 − 149,622| = 871 words 871 ÷ 250 wpm = 3 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, The Black Hawk War Including a Review of Black Hawk's Life or Lady Audley's Secret?
The Black Hawk War Including a Review of Black Hawk's Life is longer — 150,493 words against 149,622 for Lady Audley's Secret, a difference of 871 words or about 3 min of extra reading. Lady Audley's Secret is the harder read, at grade 10 against 8.6.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 49402 and no. 8954 — 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.
