Grimms’ Fairy Tales: reading level, length and free edition

Name: Grimms' Fairy Tales
Author: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

Grimms’ Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm is a fairy tales in English, in English translation. Our team rates it B1. It runs to 101,611 words with 4,854 different word forms, about 8.5–17 h of reading at 200 to 100 words per minute, and it is free from Project Gutenberg.

By the Readlang Mobile team (an independent app, not affiliated with readlang.com). Updated 31 October 2026.

Author: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Language: English
Level: B1
Form: fairy tales
Words: 101,611
Different word forms: 4,854
Forms for 95% / 98%: 1,789 / 2,964
Reading time: 8.5–17 h
Free edition: Project Gutenberg

"Grimms’ Fairy Tales" by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm is a German collection of fairy tales first published in 1812. Beginning with 86 stories and eventually expanding to 210 tales across seven editions, this seminal work transformed oral folklore into written literature. The brothers collected stories from friends, acquaintances, and old books to preserve German cultural history. What started as a scholarly project evolved through decades of revisions, with tales added and removed, content adjusted for young readers, and illustrations incorporated to become a cornerstone of Western children’s literature.

Is Grimms’ Fairy Tales right for your level?

To recognise 95% of the running words in Grimms’ Fairy Tales, you need its 1,789 most frequent word forms; for 98%, the share at which most readers manage a novel without a dictionary, 2,964. The median English B1 book in our table needs 702 forms for 95%, so by this measure the book is harder than most for its level: number 14 of 21, easiest first.

A word form is any spelling that appears in the text, so “walk” and “walked” count twice, and names count too. These numbers are a guide to how much vocabulary the book asks for, not a test. The level itself was set by hand by our team. Before you commit, read one page of the free edition and count the words you do not know: the one-page test takes two minutes.

Which words should you know before you start?

These are the words that Grimms’ Fairy Tales uses most often but that are not among the 2,000 most common word forms across all 309 English books in our library; the number is how many times each appears. Names of people and places are left out. Learning a handful of them first makes the opening chapters easier.

wolf 69
tailor 67
cook 62
flew 61
dwarf 60
bride 56
peasant 51
brothers 39
huntsman 39
mouse 37
feast 36
shudder 35
eldest 32
pick 32
skin 31

How does it begin?

A certain king had a beautiful garden, and in the garden stood a tree which bore golden apples. These apples were always counted, and about the time when they began to grow ripe it was found that every night one of them was gone.

From the Project Gutenberg edition, which is in the public domain. If this paragraph already feels slow, try a book one level lower.

How long does it take to read?

Hours to read *Grimms’ Fairy Tales* (101,611 words) at four reading speeds.
Words	100 wpm	150 wpm	200 wpm	250 wpm
101,611	17 h	11 h	8.5 h	7 h

Learners reading a book at their level often manage 100 to 150 words per minute, and readers in their first language 200 to 250. Where these speeds come from, and a calculator for your own: How long does it take to read a book?

Where can you read it for free?

The free edition is Project Gutenberg eBook #2591. Project Gutenberg publishes books that are in the public domain in the United States, as EPUB, Kindle and plain text, free and without an account. Copyright terms differ by country: if you live outside the United States, check that the book is out of copyright where you are before you download it.

To read it with a translation over every word you tap, open it in Readlang Mobile on iPhone or iPad.