The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Published 2002 · 40,150 words · about 3 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Origin of Species to read?
The Origin of Species scores 62 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 70 out of 100
- Victorian natural-history vocabulary, much of it technical and some of it now obsolete.
- Sentence structure: 78 out of 100
- Long periodic sentences with heavy subordination, typical of nineteenth-century scientific prose.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Concrete throughout — pigeons, barnacles, finches — but building to a single abstract mechanism.
- Information density: 82 out of 100
- Observation piled on observation; almost every page carries new evidence.
How The Origin of Species is regarded
The Origin of Species holds a literary regard score of 98 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.