The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems vs The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
1,636words between them — 7 min of it
The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems is longer — 276,736 words against 275,100 for The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete, a difference of 1,636 words or about 7 min of extra reading. The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete is the harder read, at grade 13.6 against 12.4.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems | The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Chaucer, Geoffrey | Rousseau, Jean-Jacques |
| Words | 276,736 | 275,100 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 18h 27m | 18h 20m |
| Unique words | 18,527 | 12,416 |
| Sentences | 8,546 | 8,914 |
| Average sentence length | 32.4 words | 30.9 words |
| Reading grade | 12.4 | 13.6 |
| Reading ease | 63.7 | 52.2 |
| Long words | 6.3% | 11.4% |
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 = |276,736 − 275,100| = 1,636 words 1,636 ÷ 250 wpm = 7 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems or The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete?
The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems is longer — 276,736 words against 275,100 for The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete, a difference of 1,636 words or about 7 min of extra reading. The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete is the harder read, at grade 13.6 against 12.4.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 2383 and no. 3913 — 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.
