How long does it take to read A Study in Scarlet?
A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle is about 43,000 words long, so it takes about 2 hours 46 minutes to read at the average adult reading speed for fiction (260 words a minute). On Scrolls it is 1,738 short chunks across 14 chapters; at 10 minutes a day you would finish it in 17 days.
How many days will it take to read A Study in Scarlet?
It depends on how many minutes a day you read. At 260 words a minute:
| Reading a day | Days to finish |
|---|---|
| 5 minutes | 34 days |
| 10 minutes | 17 days |
| 15 minutes | 12 days |
| 20 minutes | 9 days |
| 30 minutes | 6 days |
About A Study in Scarlet
The 1887 novel in which Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Part one is a London murder investigation; part two moves to Utah to tell the story behind the crime.
It opens:
In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army.
Chapters and reading times
A Study in Scarlet has 14 chapters. The longest takes about 17 minutes; the shortest about 7 minutes.
| # | Chapter | Words | Time | Chunks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mr. Sherlock Holmes | 2,758 | 11 min | 110 |
| 2 | The Science of Deduction | 3,535 | 14 min | 140 |
| 3 | The Lauriston Gardens Mystery | 3,818 | 15 min | 155 |
| 4 | What John Rance Had to Tell | 2,534 | 10 min | 103 |
| 5 | Our Advertisement Brings a Visitor | 2,516 | 10 min | 105 |
| 6 | Tobias Gregson Shows What He Can Do | 3,192 | 12 min | 136 |
| 7 | Light in the Darkness | 3,324 | 13 min | 132 |
| 8 | On the Great Alkali Plain | 3,603 | 14 min | 145 |
| 9 | The Flower of Utah | 2,573 | 10 min | 97 |
| 10 | John Ferrier Talks with the Prophet | 1,834 | 7 min | 73 |
| 11 | A Flight for Life | 3,371 | 13 min | 133 |
| 12 | The Avenging Angels | 3,526 | 14 min | 137 |
| 13 | A Continuation of the Reminiscences of John Watson, M.D. | 4,490 | 17 min | 183 |
| 14 | The Conclusion | 2,114 | 8 min | 89 |
How to read A Study in Scarlet on Scrolls
A Study in Scarlet is included in Scrolls Library, the Scrolls subscription. You can read the first chapter free as a sample before you subscribe. Scrolls shows it one short chunk per screen: swipe up for the next, the way you move through a feed, and your place syncs across devices.
How we worked this out
We counted the words in the edition you read on Scrolls, then divided by 260 words a minute, the average adult silent reading rate for English fiction in a review of 190 studies: Brysbaert (2019), “How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate”, Journal of Memory and Language 109. Fast readers will take less time and careful readers more; a Scrolls chunk averages about 6 seconds at that speed.
Other books on Scrolls
- How long does it take to read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland? About 1 hour 41 minutes.
- How long does it take to read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes? About 6 hours 41 minutes.
- How long does it take to read The Innocence of Father Brown? About 5 hours 3 minutes.
- How long does it take to read The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin? About 3 hours 27 minutes.
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