War and Peace vs Les Misérables
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
7,148words between them — 29 min of it
War and Peace is longer — 575,072 words against 567,924 for Les Misérables, a difference of 7,148 words or about 29 min of extra reading. War and Peace is the harder read, at grade 8.9 against 8.1.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| War and Peace | Les Misérables | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Tolstoy, Leo, graf | Hugo, Victor |
| Words | 575,072 | 567,924 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 38h 20m | 37h 52m |
| Unique words | 18,223 | 24,214 |
| Sentences | 27,141 | 30,777 |
| Average sentence length | 21.2 words | 18.5 words |
| Reading grade | 8.9 | 8.1 |
| Reading ease | 68.8 | 69.7 |
| Long words | 8.5% | 9.1% |
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 = |575,072 − 567,924| = 7,148 words 7,148 ÷ 250 wpm = 29 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, War and Peace or Les Misérables?
War and Peace is longer — 575,072 words against 567,924 for Les Misérables, a difference of 7,148 words or about 29 min of extra reading. War and Peace is the harder read, at grade 8.9 against 8.1.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 2600 and no. 135 — 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.
