How long does it take to read A Christmas Carol?
by Charles Dickens
1h 54m
28,600 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 4 days.
That is 4 sessions with A Christmas Carol.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 3 days.
How we worked this out
A Christmas Carol is about 28,600 words, estimated from its 104 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 1 hour 54 minutes.
Most reading-time sites default to 300 words a minute. The best evidence we could find, a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies by Marc Brysbaert, puts silent adult reading of English prose closer to 238 words a minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. We use 250. It is slower than the number you will see elsewhere, and it is closer to how people actually read.
This is still a model, not a measurement. When enough ReadersGuild readers have finished A Christmas Carol, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
A Christmas Carol at a glance
- Pages
- 104
- Author
- Charles Dickens
- Genre
- fiction
Knowing the number is the easy part.
The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read A Christmas Carol alongside each other, one session at a time.
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