The Trail of '98 vs Homer's Odyssey
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
218words between them — 1 min of it
The Trail of '98 is longer — 123,023 words against 122,805 for Homer's Odyssey, a difference of 218 words or about 1 min of extra reading. Homer's Odyssey is the harder read, at grade 10.8 against 4.8.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| The Trail of '98 | Homer's Odyssey | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Service, Robert W. (Robert William) | Snider, Denton Jaques |
| Words | 123,023 | 122,805 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 8h 12m | 8h 11m |
| Unique words | 11,574 | 8,606 |
| Sentences | 9,315 | 5,181 |
| Average sentence length | 13.2 words | 23.7 words |
| Reading grade | 4.8 | 10.8 |
| Reading ease | 83.9 | 60.1 |
| Long words | 6% | 11.2% |
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 = |123,023 − 122,805| = 218 words 218 ÷ 250 wpm = 1 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, The Trail of '98 or Homer's Odyssey?
The Trail of '98 is longer — 123,023 words against 122,805 for Homer's Odyssey, a difference of 218 words or about 1 min of extra reading. Homer's Odyssey is the harder read, at grade 10.8 against 4.8.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 22063 and no. 26275 — 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.
