War and Peace is about 590,000 words. Tiny compared to the full Harry Potter collection (about 1 million words over the 7 books), but long for a single book.

They're referring to the typo in the title, "Piece" vs "Peace".

I also thought they were contending the word count before noticing. Even remarked how I find this a weird metric, given that code is not prose [0], but then I deleted that once I picked up on what's going on.

[0] comparing the output of `wc -w` with the word counts of books I'm reasonably sure will be super off

edit: ran a calc, substituting out symbols (but not underscores), digits, and comments yields a 390K word count compared to the 660K cited. not excluding the comments yields 600K, so more than a third of all words in the sources are comments.

The ten main Malazan books are 3.3 million words, apparently. No wonder it took me such a long time to get through them.