Sorted after counting, never before
Largest vocabulary
Ranked by number of distinct words used. Topped by Modern English biography, volume 2 (of 4), I-Q at 32,207 unique words.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·50 of 683 measured texts ranked·REVIEWED JUL 2026
The first fifty, measured
| # | Book | Author | vocabulary | Reading time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Modern English biography, volume 2 (of 4), I-Q | Boase, Frederic | 32,207 unique words | 39h 57m |
| 2 | Ulysses | Joyce, James | 29,432 unique words | 17h 38m |
| 3 | Modern English biography, volume 1 (of 4), A-H | Boase, Frederic | 28,798 unique words | 37h 25m |
| 4 | The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 | Polo, Marco | 28,772 unique words | 24h 16m |
| 5 | The Complete Works of William Shakespeare | Shakespeare, William | 28,608 unique words | 64h 17m |
| 6 | The Satires of Juvenal, Persius, Sulpicia, and Lucilius | Persius | 28,333 unique words | 15h 37m |
| 7 | Main currents in American thought | Parrington, Vernon Louis | 27,385 unique words | 36h 02m |
| 8 | Gargantua and Pantagruel | Rabelais, François | 27,351 unique words | 21h 20m |
| 9 | Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete | Montaigne, Michel de | 25,883 unique words | 35h 02m |
| 10 | The Roll of Honour, Volume 1 | Ruvigny et Raineval, Melville Henry Massue, marquis de | 25,652 unique words | 51h 19m |
| 11 | Les Misérables | Hugo, Victor | 24,214 unique words | 37h 52m |
| 12 | The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete | Forster, John | 24,105 unique words | 28h 54m |
| 13 | The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition | Poe, Edgar Allan | 23,767 unique words | 29h 55m |
| 14 | Complete Prose Works | Whitman, Walt | 22,864 unique words | 15h 36m |
| 15 | The Mysteries of London, v. 4/4 | Reynolds, George W. M. (George William MacArthur) | 22,863 unique words | 28h 36m |
| 16 | The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete | Pepys, Samuel | 22,812 unique words | 85h 03m |
| 17 | Chaucer's Works, Volume 3 — The House of Fame | Chaucer, Geoffrey | 22,087 unique words | 14h 39m |
| 18 | Celebrated Crimes (Complete) | Dumas, Alexandre | 22,062 unique words | 41h 31m |
| 19 | The Bābur-nāma in English (Memoirs of Bābur) | Babur, Emperor of Hindustan | 21,612 unique words | 30h 21m |
| 20 | The Journal of Sir Walter Scott | Scott, Walter | 21,467 unique words | 21h 24m |
| 21 | A Literary History of the English People, from the Origins to the Renaissance | Jusserand, J. J. (Jean Jules) | 21,340 unique words | 12h 00m |
| 22 | Chaucer's Works, Volume 2 — Boethius and Troilus | Chaucer, Geoffrey | 21,237 unique words | 13h 43m |
| 23 | Plutarch | Plutarch | 20,846 unique words | 49h 22m |
| 24 | The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806 | Lewis, Meriwether | 20,509 unique words | 43h 21m |
| 25 | Children's Literature | Curry, Charles Madison | 20,119 unique words | 25h 18m |
| 26 | The Crown of Wild Olive | Ruskin, John | 19,531 unique words | 20h 48m |
| 27 | The History of Sir Richard Calmady | Malet, Lucas | 19,515 unique words | 17h 27m |
| 28 | Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete | Bourrienne, Louis Antoine Fauvelet de | 19,464 unique words | 32h 37m |
| 29 | That Which Hath Wings | Dehan, Richard | 18,946 unique words | 12h 25m |
| 30 | The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 4 | Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron | 18,867 unique words | 11h 17m |
| 31 | Vanity Fair | Thackeray, William Makepeace | 18,769 unique words | 20h 10m |
| 32 | Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 | Disraeli, Isaac | 18,635 unique words | 13h 22m |
| 33 | Moby Dick | Melville, Herman | 18,600 unique words | 14h 14m |
| 34 | The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems | Chaucer, Geoffrey | 18,527 unique words | 18h 27m |
| 35 | The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Jane Austen | Austen, Jane | 18,399 unique words | 51h 57m |
| 36 | Moby Dick | Melville, Herman | 18,368 unique words | 14h 16m |
| 37 | Cornish Characters and Strange Events | Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine) | 18,324 unique words | 15h 13m |
| 38 | War and Peace | Tolstoy, Leo, graf | 18,223 unique words | 38h 20m |
| 39 | Robert Elsmere | Ward, Humphry, Mrs. | 18,118 unique words | 19h 07m |
| 40 | Boston | Sinclair, Upton | 17,612 unique words | 19h 27m |
| 41 | The Pickwick Papers | Dickens, Charles | 17,580 unique words | 20h 01m |
| 42 | Nicholas Nickleby | Dickens, Charles | 17,529 unique words | 21h 30m |
| 43 | The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 2 (of 6) | Pliny, the Elder | 17,384 unique words | 16h 49m |
| 44 | Arrian on coursing | Arrian | 17,277 unique words | 6h 57m |
| 45 | English Eccentrics and Eccentricities | Timbs, John | 17,188 unique words | 11h 52m |
| 46 | The Long Roll | Johnston, Mary | 17,066 unique words | 17h 22m |
| 47 | The Rámáyan of Válmíki, translated into English verse | Valmiki | 16,900 unique words | 27h 03m |
| 48 | David Copperfield | Dickens, Charles | 16,593 unique words | 23h 40m |
| 49 | The Count of Monte Cristo | Dumas, Alexandre | 16,573 unique words | 31h 00m |
| 50 | Fifty years in Wall Street | Clews, Henry | 16,517 unique words | 23h 16m |
Ranked over the 683 texts measured here, not over everything ever printed — a ranking is only as wide as its shelf. The whole shelf, A to Z.
