The three musketeers vs The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 3 (of 6)
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
636words between them — 3 min of it
The three musketeers is longer — 230,737 words against 230,101 for The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 3 (of 6), a difference of 636 words or about 3 min of extra reading. The three musketeers is the harder read, at grade 9.7 against 7.4.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| The three musketeers | The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 3 (of 6) | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Dumas, Alexandre | Pliny, the Elder |
| Words | 230,737 | 230,101 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 15h 23m | 15h 20m |
| Unique words | 10,553 | 13,910 |
| Sentences | 9,990 | 13,905 |
| Average sentence length | 23.1 words | 16.5 words |
| Reading grade | 9.7 | 7.4 |
| Reading ease | 66.4 | 71.3 |
| Long words | 9.2% | 9.7% |
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 = |230,737 − 230,101| = 636 words 636 ÷ 250 wpm = 3 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, The three musketeers or The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 3 (of 6)?
The three musketeers is longer — 230,737 words against 230,101 for The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 3 (of 6), a difference of 636 words or about 3 min of extra reading. The three musketeers is the harder read, at grade 9.7 against 7.4.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 1257 and no. 59131 — 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.
