About 15 minutes
Stories of W.W. Jacobs: An Index to All Volumes and Stories — Reading Notes
Language Study
3,437 recorded words. Selected by the catalog's stored reading-time estimate.
View Gutenberg source #28701
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Start with a reading choice
Three of the shortest recorded reading commitments in this catalog. Times are estimates, not quality ratings.
About 15 minutes
Women in All Ages and in All Countries, v 1-10: An Index — Themes and Context
Language Study
3,357 recorded words. Selected by the catalog's stored reading-time estimate.
View Gutenberg source #32937About 21 minutes
Index of the Project Gutenberg Works of Booth Tarkington — Story, Setting & Ideas
Language Study
4,657 recorded words. Selected by the catalog's stored reading-time estimate.
View Gutenberg source #57721Search the excerpts stored with this catalog
93 of 93 catalog books have a stored excerpt with a Gutenberg source record. Search covers these excerpts only, up to 6,000 characters per book. A missing match does not mean the phrase is absent from the full work.
Read a catalog excerpt example: The 1990 United States Census [2nd] — A Closer Reading
THE 1990 UNITED STATES CENSUS These are the REGIONS commonly referred to in the US Census: NORTHEAST (NE) 9 states (ME, NH, VT, MA, RI, CT, NY, PA, NJ) Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey SOUTH (S) 16 states (DE, MD, WV, VA, NC, SC, GA, FL, AL, MS, TN, KY, AR, LA, TX, OK) Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Loui…
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Compare two books and their available excerpts
| Book | Recorded words | Estimated minutes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stories of W.W. Jacobs: An Index to All Volumes and Stories — Reading Notes | 3,437 | 15 | Gutenberg #28701 |
| Women in All Ages and in All Countries, v 1-10: An Index — Themes and Context | 3,357 | 15 | Gutenberg #32937 |
| Index of the Project Gutenberg Works of Booth Tarkington — Story, Setting & Ideas | 4,657 | 21 | Gutenberg #57721 |
How these choices and excerpts are prepared
Choices use stored catalog measurements. Estimates vary with reading speed. A shared category is a catalog label, not a claim that two books have the same argument or literary quality.
Search reads excerpt text stored with this catalog and links to its associated Gutenberg record. The connection is stored in the site database; this tool does not recheck that every excerpt is word-for-word identical to that external record. Excerpt search does not cover every chapter and does not verify historical publication dates.
Catalog snapshot checked: 2026-09-26. Coverage: 93 public books, 93 available source excerpts.
Do more with this book catalog
The Language & Linguistics Library at FROUU brings together public-domain works on grammar, philology, dictionaries, and language study. These pages offer tools to explore the collection by subject, length, and reading time, so you can find a text that fits your study or curiosity.
Whether you are a language learner, a researcher, or a casual browser, the library's interactive guides help you navigate 93 works across four categories. Use the finder to match your interests, compare titles side by side, or estimate reading time before you begin.
Each tool is built from catalog data such as word counts, subject headings, and sentence lengths. The aim is to give you a clear sense of a book's scope and style without needing to open it first.
93
books in this catalog
4
catalog categories
93
books with reading-time data
Made for this collection
Ways the catalog data becomes useful
Find Your Next Read
Describe what you want to study—a language, a topic, a length—and the finder will suggest titles from the catalog that match your preferences.
Compare Two Books
Put any two titles side by side to see word counts, reading times, and structural details. Useful for choosing between similar resources.
Estimate Reading Time
See how long a book may take to read based on its word count and typical reading pace. Plan your study sessions realistically.
Choosing a Path through the Catalog
With 93 books spread across grammar, language study, dictionaries, and philology, the FROUU Language & Linguistics Library can be approached in several ways. The Book Finder, Compare Books, and Reading Tracker each answer a different question, and using them together gives you a practical route from first interest to steady progress.
Start with the Finder
The Book Finder is the entry point. It lets you filter by category, word-count length, estimated reading time, chapter rhythm, sentence flow, and subjects. For example, if you are curious about conversational English from earlier centuries, you might set the category to Language Study and look for books with a quick reading time. A title like "Familiar dialogues — Reading Companion" appears in that category with a modest word count, making it a plausible first stop.
The Finder also lets you express no preference on any criterion without penalizing books, so you can start broadly and narrow only when you see a pattern. The catalog's median book runs about 51,849 words and takes roughly 226 minutes to read, but that median hides a wide spread: 40 books are short, while 24 are epic. Knowing where a title falls in that spread helps you set expectations before you open it.
Use Compare to See Trade-offs
Once you have two or three candidates, Compare Books lays them side by side. It shows word count, estimated reading time, text sections, sentence flow, chapter rhythm, and subjects. These are descriptive metrics, not quality judgments. They help you see whether a book will feel like a quick reference or a long immersion.
For instance, you might compare a 22,247-word dialogue book with a 477,417-word thesaurus. The difference in reading time and text sections is stark, but the comparison also reveals sentence flow: the dialogue book averages 11.5 words per sentence, while the thesaurus averages 4.4. That tells you something about pacing, not value.
Plan Progress with the Tracker
The Reading Tracker turns a choice into a plan. It records progress in pages, with a default daily goal of 20 pages. If a fixed catalog page count is unavailable, it estimates pages by dividing word count by 250. You can override that estimate with the page count from your own edition. The tracker then calculates remaining time and finish days based on your daily goal, and it stores your history in the browser without requiring an account.
Moving Between Tools
The three tools work best in sequence. Start with the Finder to narrow the field, move to Compare to weigh specific titles, and then use the Tracker to set a realistic pace. This workflow suits both the casual browser and the serious student.
Consider a reader interested in philology. The Finder might surface a title like "An essay on the origin of language, based on modern researches, and especially on the works of M. Renan — Edition Insights" with a category of Language Study. Comparing it with a grammar book could show different chapter rhythms and sentence lengths. Once chosen, the Tracker can estimate a daily page goal that fits a busy schedule. The tools do not rate quality; they simply make the catalog's range visible and manageable.