Our data · 73 novels counted

How many words are in a novel?

At least 40,000 words by the definition the Hugo and Nebula awards use, and often far more: below that line, both awards normally count a story as a novella or something shorter. In our counts of 64 classic novels written in English, the median length is 104,477 words, about 6.7 hours of reading for an adult native speaker, and half of them run to between 67,000 and 160,000 words.

By the Readlang Mobile team · Updated 1 October 2026

Where a novel begins: 40,000 words

There is no single official definition of a novel. The clearest published limits come from two long-running awards for science fiction and fantasy, the Hugo Awards and the Nebula Awards, which sort stories into four categories by length. Publishers, magazines and other prizes set their own limits, so treat these as a convention rather than a rule.

The Nebula rules use exactly these limits. The Hugo rules give the novella as "between 17,500 and 40,000" words and let the administrators move a story to a neighbouring category when its length is within 20% of that category's limits, so a story of 32,000 words or more can be placed among the novels.

By that line, these books in our list would be novellas, though some of them, such as Heart of Darkness and The Time Machine, are usually called novellas anyway: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (25,785), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (26,775), A Christmas Carol (29,025), The Call of the Wild (32,130), The Time Machine (32,763), Ethan Frome (35,086), Heart of Darkness (38,774), and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (39,766). Just above the line sit The Turn of the Screw (42,866), A Study in Scarlet (43,756), The Great Gatsby (48,659), and The Invisible Man (49,168).

How long classic novels are

Among the 64 novels written in English, 34 are longer than 100,000 words and 8 longer than 200,000. The longest is David Copperfield at 359,070 words, just ahead of Bleak House at 357,749; the shortest is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at 25,785. Leave out the 8 books below 40,000 words and the median of the remaining 56 rises from 104,477 to 115,223.

The 9 translations in the table are longer on the whole: their median is 352,575 words, from Madame Bovary at 116,887 to Les Misérables at 570,779. We chose them as famous books, and many famous translated novels are very long, so they are left out of the medians on this page; their figures are in the table.

How many words are in The Great Gatsby?

The Great Gatsby has 48,659 words in the Standard Ebooks edition we counted, in nine chapters: about 3.1 hours of reading at 260 words per minute. That is 8,659 words more than the 40,000-word minimum for a novel. The longest chapter is the seventh, with 8,841 words: the hottest day of the summer, which moves from lunch at the Buchanans' house to a suite at the Plaza Hotel and, on the drive home that evening, to Myrtle Wilson's death.

You will find slightly different totals elsewhere. They come from other editions, for example with an introduction, and from other counting rules, such as treating hyphenated words as one; see the method. For the vocabulary of the book, see different words in books: Gatsby uses 5,940 different word forms.

How many words are in War and Peace?

In the translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude, the Project Gutenberg edition, War and Peace has 566,513 words: 365 chapters in fifteen books and two epilogues. That is about 11.6 times the length of The Great Gatsby and 36 hours of reading at 260 words per minute. The chapters themselves are short: the median one has 1,422 words. Only Les Misérables, in Isabel Hapgood's translation, is longer in our table, at 570,779 words. Other English translations give other totals, and a count of the Russian original would not be comparable with an English one.

How many words are in a chapter?

There is no standard length for a chapter. In the 60 novels written in English that we could split into chapters, the median chapter of a typical book has 3,117 words, and in half of the books it falls between 2,500 and 4,300. Taken together, the 269 chapters of Jane Austen's six novels have a median of 2,565 words; the 293 chapters of the six Dickens books in our table, 3,728.

The extremes are far apart. Moby-Dick has 135 chapters with a median of 1,214 words, and the shortest of them has only 53. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has five chapters, the median one 16,584 words long.

What length means for a language learner

Length matters less for vocabulary than it seems. War and Peace is 11.6 times as long as The Great Gatsby but uses only 3 times as many different word forms (17,996 against 5,940): most of a long novel is the same words coming back. Our counts of different words in 117 books look at this in more detail.

Whether you can read a novel depends on the share of its words you already know. For an unsimplified English novel, Paul Nation estimates that knowing 98% of the running words takes about 8,000 to 9,000 word families, with names counted as known (Nation, 2006); his sample included The Great Gatsby. More on this in how many words you need. Length only decides how long the book will take, and in a second language that is usually longer than the hours in the table, which assume a native speaker's pace.

All 73 novels

Download the table as CSV (CC BY 4.0). The method is described below.

Method and limits

• Editions. 9 of the novels (7 Standard Ebooks and 2 Project Gutenberg editions) are in the Readlang Mobile library and were counted from the same EPUB files as our figures for 117 books, so the numbers agree. The other 64 are Project Gutenberg editions, counted from Project Gutenberg's EPUB files without images, which we fetched from its official mirror on 1 October 2026. Each title in the table links to the edition we counted. All of them are in the public domain in the United States; some are still in copyright in other countries.
• What counts as a word. The same rules as on our data page: a run of letters in any alphabet, lower-cased; an apostrophe inside a word keeps it one word (don't); hyphenated words count as two; numbers are not words. The e-book's own navigation file, the Project Gutenberg licence and the Standard Ebooks colophon pages are removed. Prefaces, notes, chapter titles and any list of contents printed in the book stay in, because a reader of that edition meets them.
• Chapters. A heading that reads Chapter, Stave or a bare number starts a chapter (in Jekyll and Hyde, whose chapters have only titles, each title); a heading for a book, part, volume, preface or epilogue ends one. Text that is not inside a numbered chapter, such as a preface or an epilogue without chapters, counts towards the book but not towards any chapter. For 4 books we give no chapter figures: Mrs. Dalloway has no chapters, The Sound and the Fury is in four sections headed by dates rather than numbered chapters, and The Woman in White and The Moonstone are told in a series of narratives whose chapter numbers start again in each. For Ulysses we count its eighteen episodes as chapters; this edition numbers them, though the novel itself gives them no numbers or titles.
• Translations. 9 of the novels were written in another language. Their counts belong to the English translation named in the table; another translation of the same book gives a different number.
• Reading time. Hours at 260 words per minute, Brysbaert's (2019) estimate for adult native speakers reading fiction silently in English. Most adults read fiction at 200 to 320 words per minute, and people reading in a second language are usually slower.
• Why other sources differ. Word counts quoted online come from different editions and translations, from tools that count hyphenated words as one or include numbers, and sometimes from estimates. A difference of a few percent is normal; a bigger one usually means a different edition.

References

1. Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
2. Nation, I. S. P. (2006). How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening? Canadian Modern Language Review, 63(1), 59–82. doi:10.3138/cmlr.63.1.59
3. Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. Nebula rules, effective for the award year beginning 1 January 2026. nebulas.sfwa.org/about-the-nebulas/nebula-rules
4. World Science Fiction Society. Constitution of the World Science Fiction Society, as of August 17, 2025, sections 3.2.10 and 3.3.1–3.3.4. wsfs.org