The War in the Air vs The Life of Trust
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
208words between them — 1 min of it
The War in the Air is longer — 156,625 words against 156,417 for The Life of Trust, a difference of 208 words or about 1 min of extra reading. The War in the Air is the harder read, at grade 9.4 against 9.2.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| The War in the Air | The Life of Trust | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Raleigh, Walter Alexander, Sir | Müller, George |
| Words | 156,625 | 156,417 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 10h 27m | 10h 26m |
| Unique words | 10,870 | 6,277 |
| Sentences | 8,228 | 7,074 |
| Average sentence length | 19 words | 22.1 words |
| Reading grade | 9.4 | 9.2 |
| Reading ease | 61.4 | 68.3 |
| Long words | 12.1% | 8.2% |
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 = |156,625 − 156,417| = 208 words 208 ÷ 250 wpm = 1 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, The War in the Air or The Life of Trust?
The War in the Air is longer — 156,625 words against 156,417 for The Life of Trust, a difference of 208 words or about 1 min of extra reading. The War in the Air is the harder read, at grade 9.4 against 9.2.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 28226 and no. 27288 — 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.
