The Girl Philippa vs The Odyssey
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
335words between them — 1 min of it
The Girl Philippa is longer — 129,637 words against 129,302 for The Odyssey, a difference of 335 words or about 1 min of extra reading. The Odyssey is the harder read, at grade 13.4 against 8.4.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| The Girl Philippa | The Odyssey | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Chambers, Robert W. (Robert William) | Homer |
| Words | 129,637 | 129,302 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 8h 39m | 8h 37m |
| Unique words | 10,660 | 7,438 |
| Sentences | 6,721 | 3,610 |
| Average sentence length | 19.3 words | 35.8 words |
| Reading grade | 8.4 | 13.4 |
| Reading ease | 69.1 | 62.4 |
| Long words | 8.3% | 5.3% |
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 = |129,637 − 129,302| = 335 words 335 ÷ 250 wpm = 1 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, The Girl Philippa or The Odyssey?
The Girl Philippa is longer — 129,637 words against 129,302 for The Odyssey, a difference of 335 words or about 1 min of extra reading. The Odyssey is the harder read, at grade 13.4 against 8.4.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 52404 and no. 1727 — 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.
