The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Complete vs The loyalists of America and their times
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
847words between them — 3 min of it
The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Complete is longer — 229,848 words against 229,001 for The loyalists of America and their times, a difference of 847 words or about 3 min of extra reading. The loyalists of America and their times is the harder read, at grade 14.4 against 13.3.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Complete | The loyalists of America and their times | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Suetonius | Ryerson, Egerton |
| Words | 229,848 | 229,001 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 15h 19m | 15h 16m |
| Unique words | 16,029 | 11,815 |
| Sentences | 8,133 | 7,804 |
| Average sentence length | 28.3 words | 29.3 words |
| Reading grade | 13.3 | 14.4 |
| Reading ease | 50.2 | 43.8 |
| Long words | 13.1% | 15.8% |
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 = |229,848 − 229,001| = 847 words 847 ÷ 250 wpm = 3 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Complete or The loyalists of America and their times?
The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Complete is longer — 229,848 words against 229,001 for The loyalists of America and their times, a difference of 847 words or about 3 min of extra reading. The loyalists of America and their times is the harder read, at grade 14.4 against 13.3.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 6400 and no. 21012 — 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.
