The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 vs The Brothers Karamazov
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
12,480words between them — 50 min of it
The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 is longer — 363,924 words against 351,444 for The Brothers Karamazov, a difference of 12,480 words or about 50 min of extra reading. The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 is the harder read, at grade 7.8 against 7.3.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 | The Brothers Karamazov | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Polo, Marco | Dostoyevsky, Fyodor |
| Words | 363,924 | 351,444 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 24h 16m | 23h 26m |
| Unique words | 28,772 | 12,519 |
| Sentences | 23,101 | 20,499 |
| Average sentence length | 15.8 words | 17.1 words |
| Reading grade | 7.8 | 7.3 |
| Reading ease | 67.4 | 73.5 |
| Long words | 11.1% | 8.6% |
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 = |363,924 − 351,444| = 12,480 words 12,480 ÷ 250 wpm = 50 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 or The Brothers Karamazov?
The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 is longer — 363,924 words against 351,444 for The Brothers Karamazov, a difference of 12,480 words or about 50 min of extra reading. The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 is the harder read, at grade 7.8 against 7.3.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 10636 and no. 28054 — 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.
