Uncle Tom's Cabin vs Cicero's Tusculan Disputations
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
1,303words between them — 5 min of it
Uncle Tom's Cabin is longer — 182,678 words against 181,375 for Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, a difference of 1,303 words or about 5 min of extra reading. Cicero's Tusculan Disputations is the harder read, at grade 12.5 against 9.1.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Uncle Tom's Cabin | Cicero's Tusculan Disputations | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Stowe, Harriet Beecher | Cicero, Marcus Tullius |
| Words | 182,678 | 181,375 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 12h 11m | 12h 06m |
| Unique words | 12,160 | 11,884 |
| Sentences | 7,955 | 6,350 |
| Average sentence length | 23 words | 28.6 words |
| Reading grade | 9.1 | 12.5 |
| Reading ease | 70.9 | 56.1 |
| Long words | 7.1% | 11% |
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 = |182,678 − 181,375| = 1,303 words 1,303 ÷ 250 wpm = 5 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Uncle Tom's Cabin or Cicero's Tusculan Disputations?
Uncle Tom's Cabin is longer — 182,678 words against 181,375 for Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, a difference of 1,303 words or about 5 min of extra reading. Cicero's Tusculan Disputations is the harder read, at grade 12.5 against 9.1.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 203 and no. 14988 — 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.
