Reading · 8 min read

By Mohamad Mohamad · 29 October 2026

How many words are in famous books?

A Christmas Carol is 28,731 words long. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is 26,865, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is 25,787, and The Wind in the Willows is 59,963. Each of those was counted from the full text of the edition, and so is every other word count on this page.

Below are 51 well-known books in English and 42 in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch, each with its word count, reading level or difficulty, and reading time. Every title links to the book's own page in the ClickBook library, where the rest of its measurements are.

Famous English books by word count

The tables run from shortest to longest. Level is the CEFR band the book measures at on the English shelf, worked out by looking up every word of the text in a graded vocabulary list. Time is reading time at a learner's pace of 130 words a minute; a native reader is roughly twice as fast. An asterisk marks a book written in another language: the count is for the English translation.

Under 40,000 words

By the length categories the Hugo and Nebula awards use (see below), the novels here are all novella length, including books most people would call novels. The Prophet, at 12,359 words, would count as a novelette.

40,000 to 60,000 words

Short novels, and several collections: Aesop's Fables, Poirot Investigates and Wilde's Children's Stories are many short pieces under one cover.

Over 60,000 words

* English translation.

The longest book on the English shelf is At the Back of the North Wind, at 89,115 words. The English shelf does not yet hold the very long nineteenth-century novels in English, so you will not find Bleak House or Middlemarch here. This page leaves them out rather than quote a figure that was not measured.

Across all 170 books on the English shelf, the median is just under 50,000 words, and 46 of them come in under 40,000.

Famous books in other languages

These come from the library's German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch shelves. Two things work differently from the English tables.

• No CEFR level. No comparable openly licensed CEFR word list exists for these languages, so each book gets a difficulty score out of 100 instead, measured against the other books on the same shelf. A 60 in German and a 60 in French cannot be compared.
• Some are single volumes. Several famous titles are here only as one volume of a longer work, and the tables say so. The count is for that volume, not for the whole work.

Translations are counted as translated. Gevoel en verstand is Austen's Sense and Sensibility in Dutch, and its 125,570 words are the Dutch text's, not the English original's.

German

The two volumes of Der Zauberberg add up to 306,417 words, longer than any single book in the library. Goethe's Faust is Part One only; the shelf does not hold Part Two. All 40 German books.

French

Les Misérables is the clearest case of a partial volume. Fantine alone is 111,887 words, and it is the first of five volumes; the other four are not on the shelf, so there is no measured total for the whole novel here. The same goes for Monte-Cristo and for Proust. Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, by contrast, is the complete novel. All 40 French books.

Spanish

Rizal wrote both of his novels in Spanish. Noli me tángere is also on the Dutch shelf in translation, where it is 136,536 words. All 39 Spanish books.

Italian

All 39 Italian books.

Portuguese

Two of these are in the edition's older spelling on their book pages: Memorias Posthumas de Braz Cubas and A Illustre Casa de Ramires. All 40 Portuguese books.

Dutch

All 40 Dutch books.

How the counts were made

ClickBook measured each book from its full text, not from a sample. The English books are the Standard Ebooks editions; the other six shelves use Project Gutenberg editions, and each book page links to its source.

Front and back matter is stripped first, and what remains is split into words. The count is of running words, so a word that appears fifty times counts fifty times. That is the number that decides how long a book takes to read. How books are measured sets out the rest of the method, including where it is weaker than the numbers make it look.

Why other sources give different numbers

If you have seen another figure for one of these books, it is probably not wrong. It is probably counting a slightly different text.

• The edition. Two Project Gutenberg editions of Faust, Part One, measure 30,693 and 30,844 words. Same play, different files.
• What is included. An introduction, footnotes or a translator's notes can add thousands of words to a count that leaves them in.
• How a word is defined. Hyphenated compounds, contractions and numbers can each be counted as one word or several, and counting tools differ.
• The language. A translation is a different text, and it can run noticeably longer or shorter than the original.

A gap of a few percent between two sources is normal. A gap of a third or more usually means one of them is counting something else: an abridgement, a single volume, or a collection with extra stories.

Turning words into hours and pages

Hours. The reading times on this page divide the word count by 130 words a minute, which is about 7,800 words an hour. That is a deliberately slow pace, realistic for a language you are still learning. Reading in your own language is roughly twice as fast, so as a rule of thumb take about 15,000 words an hour. At that speed A Christmas Carol is about two hours and The Wind in the Willows about four.

Pages. Assume 250 to 300 words on a printed page of an ordinary paperback. That makes A Christmas Carol roughly 95 to 115 pages, The Wind in the Willows 200 to 240, and Fantine 375 to 450. Real editions vary a lot with type size, margins, illustrations and how much dialogue there is, so treat a page figure as a rough size, not as any edition's page count.

Common questions

How many words is a novel?

There is no single rule, but the clearest written thresholds are the category definitions of two science-fiction awards, the Hugo Awards (in the World Science Fiction Society's constitution) and SFWA's Nebula Awards. Both draw the same lines:

• Novel — 40,000 words or more.
• Novella — 17,500 to 40,000 words.
• Novelette — 7,500 to 17,500 words.
• Short story — under 7,500 words.

They are award rules, not a law of publishing. By those lines Alice, A Christmas Carol and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are all novellas.

How many words is A Christmas Carol?

28,731 words. A Christmas Carol measures B2 on the English shelf and takes about four hours at a learner's pace, or around two in your own language.

How many words is Alice in Wonderland?

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is 26,865 words. The sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, is 29,954, so the two together come to 56,819.

How many words is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is 25,787 words, about three hours at a learner's pace. It is one of the shortest books in the English tables above.

How long is a 50,000-word book?

About six and a half hours at a learner's pace, a little over three in your own language, and somewhere around 170 to 200 printed pages, on the same rules of thumb as above.

Is a longer book a harder one?

No. Length and difficulty are measured separately and do not track each other. At the Back of the North Wind is the longest book on the English shelf and measures B1, at 22/100. The House at Pooh Corner is under a third of its length and measures C1, at 42/100. If you are choosing a book to read in a language you are learning, how to choose an English book for your level explains why a shorter book you finish is often the better choice, and how many words you need to read a book explains the vocabulary side.