The Roll of Honour, Volume 1 vs Plutarch
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
29,368words between them — 1h 57m of it
The Roll of Honour, Volume 1 is longer — 769,749 words against 740,381 for Plutarch, a difference of 29,368 words or about 1h 57m of extra reading. Plutarch is the harder read, at grade 19.5 against 5.3.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| The Roll of Honour, Volume 1 | Plutarch | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Ruvigny et Raineval, Melville Henry Massue, marquis de | Plutarch |
| Words | 769,749 | 740,381 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 51h 19m | 49h 22m |
| Unique words | 25,652 | 20,846 |
| Sentences | 76,158 | 16,012 |
| Average sentence length | 10.1 words | 46.2 words |
| Reading grade | 5.3 | 19.5 |
| Reading ease | 74.8 | 37.4 |
| Long words | 9.8% | 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 = |769,749 − 740,381| = 29,368 words 29,368 ÷ 250 wpm = 1h 57m of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, The Roll of Honour, Volume 1 or Plutarch?
The Roll of Honour, Volume 1 is longer — 769,749 words against 740,381 for Plutarch, a difference of 29,368 words or about 1h 57m of extra reading. Plutarch is the harder read, at grade 19.5 against 5.3.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 75883 and no. 674 — 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.
