At One Place

How long does it take to read Moby-Dick?

How long to read Moby-Dick
about 15 hours
roughly 209,000 words

Moby-Dick is around 209,000 words, about fifteen hours of reading. Published word counts range from 206,052 to 212,758 depending on which edition is counted, a spread of about 3%. A substantial share of the book is expository material on whales and whaling rather than narrative, which is the usual reason people abandon it around chapter 32. It is shorter than Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by a small margin.

The numbers

Total
14 hours 38 minutes
In hours
14.6 hours
Non-stop
0.6 days without sleeping
Covers
roughly 209,000 words
At a realistic pace
an hour a night
That works out as
about 15 days

What this assumes

About 209,000 words at 238 words per minute. Editions differ by roughly 3%.

No primary source publishes a word count; figures from 206,052 to 212,758 circulate.

Other books

What How long
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone about 5 hours 23 minutes
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix about 18 hours
The Hobbit about 6 hours 39 minutes
The Bible about 55 hours
War and Peace about 40 hours
Infinite Jest about 40 hours
Ulysses about 19 hours
Dune about 13 hours
Pride and Prejudice about 8 hours 33 minutes
Nineteen Eighty-Four about 6 hours 14 minutes
The Great Gatsby about 3 hours 18 minutes
Animal Farm about 2 hours 6 minutes
It about 31 hours
The complete works of Shakespeare about 59 hours
The complete Sherlock Holmes about 72 hours as an audiobook
All of English Wikipedia about 41 years

Common questions

How long does it take to read Moby-Dick?
about 15 hours — roughly 209,000 words.
What does that assume?
About 209,000 words at 238 words per minute. Editions differ by roughly 3%.
How long at a realistic pace?
an hour a night — about 15 days.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Calculated on this page — At One Place

How these figures are compiled and checked