Reading Level Checker
Paste English text and get four reading levels at once: Flesch-Kincaid grade, Flesch reading ease, Coleman-Liau index and the Automated Readability Index. What is different here is that the working is on the page. Each formula is printed with this text's own counts substituted into it, and the counts themselves, words, sentences, syllables, letters and characters, sit in a table underneath with the rule each one was counted by. Syllables are the only estimated number, so the heuristic is written out, the longest words are listed with the count the page gave them, and any word it reads wrong can be corrected by hand. The two Flesch scores follow the correction and the other two, which never look at syllables, do not move.
- Grade
- not scored
- Ease
- not scored
- Words
- 0
- Sentences
- 0
The syllable count is the one estimate on this page. Correct a word here and both Flesch scores follow; Coleman-Liau and ARI never look at syllables.
Every score, with its working
The same text through four published formulas. They disagree, and the gap between the two that count syllables and the two that count letters is the honest error bar on any single reading level.
The counts every score is built from
Five of these numbers are what the formulas divide and multiply. They are on the page so a grade can be checked by hand rather than taken on trust.
| Count | This text | How it is counted |
|---|---|---|
| Words | 0 | Runs between spaces holding a letter or a digit, punctuation on the ends taken off. |
| Sentences | 0 | Splits on . ! ? and their CJK forms, skipping titles, initials and decimal points. Text with no full stop counts as one. |
| Syllables | 0 | Vowel groups in the word, with a silent final e removed, a silent ed and a silent es removed, and a word ending in a consonant plus le kept as its own syllable. A hyphenated word is counted a part at a time, and a word with no Latin letters, such as a number, counts as one. |
| Letters and digits | 0 | Letters and digits inside words. This is the letters of Coleman-Liau and the characters of ARI. |
| Characters | 0 | Everything typed, spaces and punctuation included. Not used by any of the four formulas. |
| Paragraphs | 0 | Blocks separated by a blank line. |
| Words a sentence | 0.00 | Words divided by sentences. Every one of the four formulas uses it. |
| Syllables a word | 0.000 | Syllables divided by words. Only Flesch-Kincaid and reading ease use it. |
| Letters a word | 0.000 | Letters and digits divided by words. Coleman-Liau and ARI use it instead of syllables. |
| Words of 3 syllables or more | 0 | Counted for reference. None of the four formulas uses it. |
What these numbers are, and what they are not
These four scores describe the text, not the person reading it. They are estimates worked out from counts, not a reading test and not a placement. A formula counts sentence length and word length, so it can be fooled: a list of short nonsense sentences scores as plain English, and one careful sentence with a long technical name in it scores as hard. Read the score as a pointer to the paragraph worth rewriting, then read the paragraph.
Common questions
- What reading level is my text?
- The stage shows the Flesch-Kincaid grade by default, which is the US school grade whose reading material the text resembles: 8.2 means it reads like eighth grade material, not that an eighth grader is your audience. The other three scores are underneath with their working. A general audience page usually lands between grade 6 and grade 9; plain-language guidance for public documents usually asks for grade 8 or lower. Below one the tool says the text is simpler than first grade material, and above 17 it says postgraduate, because the formulas run past both ends of the school scale.
- What grade level should a blog post or a public document aim for?
- Convention, not a rule the tool enforces: most general-audience writing on the web sits between grade 6 and grade 9, plain-language guidance for public documents usually asks for grade 8 or lower, and a technical or academic piece for a specialist audience sits well above that without anything being wrong with it. The page reports where your text falls and names the band next to the number. It offers no target of its own, because the right level depends on who is reading and a formula has not read anything.
- How is the syllable count worked out?
- By a heuristic, and the page says so rather than implying a dictionary. It counts the vowel groups in a word, takes off a silent final e, takes off a silent ed and a silent es, and keeps the syllable in a word that ends in a consonant plus le, so table is two and walked is one. A hyphenated word is counted a part at a time. A word with no Latin letters, a number for instance, counts as one. It gets ordinary prose right and misses a handful of words in a way anyone can see: science comes out as one syllable, area and idea as two. That is why the longest words in your text are listed with the count the page used, and why a correction box sits next to them.
- Why do the four scores disagree?
- Because they measure different things. Flesch-Kincaid and Flesch reading ease work from sentence length and syllables a word. Coleman-Liau and the Automated Readability Index work from sentence length and letters a word, which was the point of them: a machine could count letters without a pronunciation dictionary. A page full of short words with many syllables, or long words with few, will separate the pairs by a grade or two. Seeing all four at once is the honest version of a reading level, and the gap between them is the error bar that a single number hides.
- What is a good Flesch reading ease score?
- 60 to 69 is the standard band, which reads as plain English at about US grade 8 to 9. Above 80 is easy, below 30 is very difficult and reads as postgraduate material. The scale is nominally 0 to 100 and the formula runs outside it in both directions: a paragraph of one-syllable words in five-word sentences can score above 110, and a single 100-word sentence of technical vocabulary can score below zero. The tool prints the real number rather than clamping it, and names the band next to the score.
- How much text does it need to be meaningful?
- About 100 words. Below that the tool still scores the text and adds a line saying the figure swings on a single sentence, because it does: one full stop moved changes words a sentence, and words a sentence is a term in all four formulas. A single word is scored too, and comes out looking strange, which is exactly what a formula built for paragraphs does with one word. For comparing two drafts, use a similar length of each.
- Is my text uploaded anywhere?
- No. The counting and the arithmetic run in the page itself, so an unpublished draft, a client document or a pupil's essay stays on your own machine. There is no account and no sign-up. Up to 500,000 characters are scored in one pass, and a longer text is refused with the two numbers printed rather than being quietly cut short, because a reading level worked out from a truncated document would be wrong about the document. Up to 50,000 characters of your draft, your chosen score and your syllable corrections are kept in this browser so they are still here when you come back.
- Can I check a Word file or a PDF?
- Not as a file. Open the document, select the text and paste it in. Pasting from a word processor brings the paragraph breaks with it, which is what the sentence count needs, and page furniture such as headers, captions and footnotes will be counted as sentences if you paste them, so leave them out when the score matters.
- Are these scores a test of the reader?
- No. Every one of these formulas describes a piece of writing, using only how long its sentences are and how long its words are. None of them has read anything, so none of them can tell whether the argument holds up, whether the vocabulary is familiar to your particular audience, or whether a short sentence is empty. Use the number to find the paragraph that ran away from you, then read that paragraph.
Exact arithmetic on the words, sentences and characters it counts, and every count is shown so you can check it. Syllables are counted by a published heuristic, not a dictionary, so the two syllable-based scores carry its error: a few tenths of a grade, and a point or two of reading ease. Any word the heuristic reads wrong can be corrected by hand, and both scores follow.