The Mysterious Island vs Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
316words between them — 1 min of it
The Mysterious Island is longer — 193,212 words against 192,896 for Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1, a difference of 316 words or about 1 min of extra reading. Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1 is the harder read, at grade 10.4 against 9.7.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| The Mysterious Island | Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Verne, Jules | Darwin, Charles |
| Words | 193,212 | 192,896 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 12h 53m | 12h 52m |
| Unique words | 10,002 | 12,375 |
| Sentences | 8,717 | 8,357 |
| Average sentence length | 22.2 words | 23.1 words |
| Reading grade | 9.7 | 10.4 |
| Reading ease | 64.8 | 61.5 |
| Long words | 9% | 10.7% |
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 = |193,212 − 192,896| = 316 words 316 ÷ 250 wpm = 1 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, The Mysterious Island or Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1?
The Mysterious Island is longer — 193,212 words against 192,896 for Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1, a difference of 316 words or about 1 min of extra reading. Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1 is the harder read, at grade 10.4 against 9.7.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 1268 and no. 2087 — 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.
