How long does it take to read Nineteen Eighty-Four?
George Orwell
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell takes about 5 hours 50 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 50 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1949. 318 pages, about 87,450 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 43 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 50 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 39 minutes |
The page count is the median across 727 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, often referred to as 1984, is a dystopian social science fiction novel by the English novelist George Orwell (the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair). It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, Nineteen Eighty-Four centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of persons and behaviours within society. Orwell, himself a democratic socialist, modelled the authoritarian government in the novel after Stalinist Russia. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within politics and the ways in which they are manipulated.
Subjects: futurology, censorship, surveillance, rebels, sting operations, historical negationism
