How long does it actually take to read War and Peace? Which classic novel is short enough for a weekend? This table lists every edition in our library with its word count and an estimated reading time at 300 words per minute. It is sorted longest to shortest.
The counts follow the text of each edition as published here, not an average of other editions, so the same title may differ by a few thousand words elsewhere.
The table
| Title | Author | Year | Words | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy | 1869 | 580,000 | 32.2 |
| Les Misérables | Victor Hugo | 1888 | 530,000 | 29.4 |
| The Count of Monte Cristo | Alexandre Dumas | 1844 | 464,000 | 25.8 |
| The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoevsky | 1880 | 360,000 | 20.0 |
| David Copperfield | Charles Dickens | 1850 | 358,000 | 19.9 |
| Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy | 1878 | 350,000 | 19.4 |
| Middlemarch | George Eliot | 1871 | 316,000 | 17.6 |
| The Mysteries of Udolpho | Ann Radcliffe | 1794 | 280,000 | 15.6 |
| The Woman in White | Wilkie Collins | 1860 | 245,000 | 13.6 |
| Crime and Punishment | Fyodor Dostoevsky | 1866 | 211,000 | 11.7 |
| Moby-Dick | Herman Melville | 1851 | 206,000 | 11.4 |
| The Origin of Species | Charles Darwin | 1859 | 201,000 | 11.2 |
| The Moonstone | Wilkie Collins | 1868 | 196,000 | 10.9 |
| Little Women | Louisa May Alcott | 1868 | 188,000 | 10.4 |
| The Hunchback of Notre-Dame | Victor Hugo | 1831 | 188,000 | 10.4 |
| Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë | 1847 | 185,000 | 10.3 |
| Great Expectations | Charles Dickens | 1861 | 183,000 | 10.2 |
| Household Tales | 1857 | 170,000 | 9.4 | |
| Germinal | Émile Zola | 1885 | 165,000 | 9.2 |
| Dracula | Bram Stoker | 1897 | 160,000 | 8.9 |
| Emma | Jane Austen | 1815 | 160,000 | 8.9 |
| Tess of the d’Urbervilles | Thomas Hardy | 1891 | 150,000 | 8.3 |
| The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. | Washington Irving | 1820 | 139,000 | 7.7 |
| The Mayor of Casterbridge | Thomas Hardy | 1886 | 138,000 | 7.7 |
| A Tale of Two Cities | Charles Dickens | 1859 | 135,000 | 7.5 |
| The Odyssey | Homer | 1879 | 125,000 | 6.9 |
| Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen | 1813 | 122,000 | 6.8 |
| Robinson Crusoe | Daniel Defoe | 1719 | 121,000 | 6.7 |
| Sense and Sensibility | Jane Austen | 1811 | 119,000 | 6.6 |
| Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert | 1857 | 118,000 | 6.6 |
| Anne of Green Gables | L. M. Montgomery | 1908 | 118,000 | 6.6 |
| Wuthering Heights | Emily Brontë | 1847 | 115,000 | 6.4 |
| Thus Spake Zarathustra | Friedrich Nietzsche | 1883 | 115,000 | 6.4 |
| The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain | 1884 | 109,000 | 6.1 |
| Gulliver’s Travels | Jonathan Swift | 1727 | 106,000 | 5.9 |
| The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes | Arthur Conan Doyle | 1892 | 105,000 | 5.8 |
| Bel Ami | Guy de Maupassant | 1885 | 105,000 | 5.8 |
| Two Treatises of Government | John Locke | 1689 | 104,000 | 5.8 |
| The Age of Innocence | Edith Wharton | 1920 | 102,000 | 5.7 |
| The Scarlet Pimpernel | Baroness Orczy | 1905 | 88,000 | 4.9 |
| Father Goriot | Honoré de Balzac | 1834 | 88,000 | 4.9 |
| Persuasion | Jane Austen | 1817 | 83,000 | 4.6 |
| The Blue Castle | L. M. Montgomery | 1926 | 82,000 | 4.6 |
| The Secret Garden | Frances Hodgson Burnett | 1910 | 80,500 | 4.5 |
| The Secret of Chimneys | Agatha Christie | 1925 | 78,000 | 4.3 |
| The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin | Benjamin Franklin | 1791 | 78,000 | 4.3 |
| Beyond Good and Evil | Friedrich Nietzsche | 1886 | 78,000 | 4.3 |
| The Picture of Dorian Gray | Oscar Wilde | 1890 | 78,000 | 4.3 |
| Meditations | Marcus Aurelius | 75,000 | 4.2 | |
| Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus | Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley | 1818 | 75,000 | 4.2 |
| A Room with a View | E. M. Forster | 1908 | 72,000 | 4.0 |
| Silas Marner | George Eliot | 1861 | 72,000 | 4.0 |
| The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar | Maurice Leblanc | 1907 | 72,000 | 4.0 |
| The Adventures of Tom Sawyer | Mark Twain | 1876 | 70,000 | 3.9 |
| The Souls of Black Folk | W. E. B. Du Bois | 1903 | 69,000 | 3.8 |
| Treasure Island | Robert Louis Stevenson | 1883 | 67,000 | 3.7 |
| Fathers and Children | Ivan Turgenev | 1862 | 65,000 | 3.6 |
| Around the World in Eighty Days | Jules Verne | 1873 | 65,000 | 3.6 |
| The Scarlet Letter | Nathaniel Hawthorne | 1850 | 64,000 | 3.6 |
| The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare | G. K. Chesterton | 1908 | 62,000 | 3.4 |
| The War of the Worlds | H. G. Wells | 1898 | 60,000 | 3.3 |
| The Hound of the Baskervilles | Arthur Conan Doyle | 1902 | 59,000 | 3.3 |
| On Liberty | John Stuart Mill | 1859 | 52,000 | 2.9 |
| The Jungle Book | Rudyard Kipling | 1894 | 52,000 | 2.9 |
| The Invisible Man | H. G. Wells | 1897 | 48,000 | 2.7 |
| The Red Badge of Courage | Stephen Crane | 1895 | 48,000 | 2.7 |
| The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | 1925 | 47,094 | 2.6 |
| Peter and Wendy | J. M. Barrie | 1911 | 47,000 | 2.6 |
| The Sign of the Four | Arthur Conan Doyle | 1890 | 44,000 | 2.4 |
| Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad | 1899 | 38,000 | 2.1 |
| The Prince | Niccolò Machiavelli | 1532 | 35,000 | 1.9 |
| The Time Machine | H. G. Wells | 1895 | 32,000 | 1.8 |
| The Call of the Wild | Jack London | 1903 | 32,000 | 1.8 |
| A Christmas Carol | Charles Dickens | 1843 | 28,500 | 1.6 |
| A Doll’s House | Henrik Ibsen | 1879 | 27,000 | 1.5 |
| Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland | Lewis Carroll | 1865 | 27,000 | 1.5 |
| The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde | Robert Louis Stevenson | 1886 | 25,500 | 1.4 |
| Romeo and Juliet | William Shakespeare | 1597 | 25,000 | 1.4 |
| A Study in Scarlet | Arthur Conan Doyle | 1887 | 0 |
The short ones and the long ones
The shortest complete works here are A Christmas Carol at about 28,500 words — an evening — and A Study in Scarlet and The Time Machine, both under 60,000. The longest are David Copperfield at roughly 358,000 words and War and Peace, which at 580,000 words is the only title here that most readers should plan in weekly instalments.
A useful rule: under 90,000 words is two or three evenings; 150,000 is a fortnight of commutes; over 300,000 is a project.
How the numbers are calculated
Word counts come from the EPUB text of each edition, excluding front matter, endnotes and the colophon. Reading time assumes 300 words per minute, which is a comfortable pace for nineteenth-century prose; at 200 words per minute, add fifty per cent.
Related
- EPUB vs AZW3 vs KEPUB — which file to download
- Public domain, explained — why these editions are free
Frequently asked questions
How many words is War and Peace?
About 580,000 words in English translation, or roughly 32 hours at 300 words per minute.
What is the shortest classic novel on this list?
A Christmas Carol, at about 28,500 words — roughly 1.6 hours.
How long does it take to read a 100,000-word novel?
About 5.5 hours at 300 words per minute, or four to six reading sessions for most people.
Are these word counts the same in every edition?
No. Counts differ by edition and translation; these follow the text published on this site.
Does reading time include notes and introductions?
No — front matter, endnotes and colophons are excluded.
Why 300 words per minute?
It is a common estimate for sustained reading of older prose; slower readers should scale the hours up.
More collections
More by length
- The 15 longest classic novels — and what they actually cost in hours
- 15 short classics under 90,000 words — an evening or two each