Uncle Tom's Cabin vs The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
1,816words between them — 7 min of it
Uncle Tom's Cabin is longer — 182,678 words against 180,862 for The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919, a difference of 1,816 words or about 7 min of extra reading. The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 is the harder read, at grade 9.6 against 9.1.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Uncle Tom's Cabin | The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Stowe, Harriet Beecher | Various |
| Words | 182,678 | 180,862 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 12h 11m | 12h 03m |
| Unique words | 12,160 | 12,424 |
| Sentences | 7,955 | 8,977 |
| Average sentence length | 23 words | 20.1 words |
| Reading grade | 9.1 | 9.6 |
| Reading ease | 70.9 | 61.8 |
| Long words | 7.1% | 12.4% |
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 − 180,862| = 1,816 words 1,816 ÷ 250 wpm = 7 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Uncle Tom's Cabin or The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919?
Uncle Tom's Cabin is longer — 182,678 words against 180,862 for The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919, a difference of 1,816 words or about 7 min of extra reading. The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 is the harder read, at grade 9.6 against 9.1.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 203 and no. 21093 — 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.
