Books by level / English books
Notre-Dame de Paris: reading level, length and free edition
Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo is a novel in English. Our team rates it C1. It runs to 185,410 words with 13,945 different word forms, about 15–31 h of reading at 200 to 100 words per minute, and it is free from Standard Ebooks.
- Author
- Victor Hugo
- Language
- English
- Level
- C1
- Form
- novel
- Words
- 185,410
- Different word forms
- 13,945
- Forms for 95% / 98%
- 6,219 / 10,237
- Reading time
- 15–31 h
- Free edition
- Standard Ebooks
An archdeacon of Notre-Dame and his bellringer fall in love with the same gypsy, with tragic results.
Is Notre-Dame de Paris right for your level?
To recognise 95% of the running words in Notre-Dame de Paris, you need its 6,219 most frequent word forms; for 98%, the share at which most readers manage a novel without a dictionary, 10,237. The median English C1 book in our table needs 4,633 forms for 95%, so by this measure the book is harder than most for its level: number 9 of 11, 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 Notre-Dame de Paris 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.
- archdeacon 195
- gypsy 179
- beheld 110
- goat 104
- cell 102
- architecture 99
- resumed 91
- towers 89
- sire 75
- deaf 75
- edifice 67
- pavement 62
- scholar 53
- provost 51
- recluse 50
How does it begin?
Three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago today, the Parisians awoke to the sound of all the bells in the triple circuit of the city, the university, and the town ringing a full peal.
From the Standard Ebooks 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?
| Words | 100 wpm | 150 wpm | 200 wpm | 250 wpm |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 185,410 | 31 h | 21 h | 15 h | 12 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 from Standard Ebooks, a volunteer project that proofreads and typesets public-domain books. Standard Ebooks releases its editions into the public domain in the United States under CC0 1.0; you can download it as EPUB, Kindle (AZW3) or KEPUB without signing up.
To read it with a translation over every word you tap, open it in Readlang Mobile on iPhone or iPad.
What to read next at C1
English books at the same level that ask for a similar amount of vocabulary:
- The End of the World, Geoffrey Dennis: 39,220 words, 5,265 forms for 95%
- Napoleon’s Letters to Josephine, 1796–1812, Napoleon Bonaparte: 91,618 words, 4,737 forms for 95%
- Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche: 63,710 words, 4,633 forms for 95%
- The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Mahatma Gandhi: 173,864 words, 4,476 forms for 95%
- The Bābur-nāma in English (Memoirs of Bābur), Babur: 416,383 words, 8,202 forms for 95%
- The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt: 211,395 words, 8,675 forms for 95%
See also all English books by level and books at C1 in all five languages.