Length of longest word in a list

Question

What is the more pythonic way of getting the length of the longest word:

len(max(words, key=len))

Or:

max(len(w) for w in words)

Answer 1

Although:

max(len(w) for w in words)

does kind of "read" easier - you've got the overhead of a generator.

While:

len(max(words, key=len))

can optimise away with the key using builtins and since len is normally a very efficient op for strings, is going to be faster...