AbstractIn this article, the authors characterize higher‐order Sobolev spaces , with , and , or with , and , via the Lusin area function and the Littlewood–Paley ‐function in terms of ball averages, where denotes the maximal integer not greater than . Moreover, the authors also complement the above results in the endpoint cases of p via establishing some weak type estimates. These improve and develop the corresponding known results for Sobolev spaces with smoothness order .