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 shows how the choice of formula affects the estimate.
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?
- The heuristic counts vowel groups, adjusts silent endings and handles consonant-plus-le and hyphenated parts. It is not a pronunciation dictionary: science, idea and area are examples that can be miscounted. Add corrections such as science = 2 to update both Flesch formulas. Letter-based Coleman-Liau and ARI do not use those corrections.
- Why do the four scores disagree?
- Flesch-Kincaid grade and Flesch reading ease use sentence length and syllables per word. Coleman-Liau and ARI use sentence length and letter counts instead. Their different calibrations and counting rules can produce different results. The disagreement shows sensitivity to the formula; it is not a measured confidence interval. Each formula is printed with the text’s counts so you can check its working.
- 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. Counts and scores are calculated in your browser without an upload or account. The complete pasted text is scored with no fixed input-size ceiling; browser memory and processing time are the practical limits. Drafts up to 50,000 characters, selected scores and syllable corrections can be remembered locally. A longer text is scored in full but omitted from draft storage.
- 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.
- Can I find the reading level of a named book?
- Paste a representative passage from the book to estimate its text readability. This is not a lookup of a publisher’s reading age, Lexile measure, Accelerated Reader level or guided-reading band. No book catalogue or reader assessment is included.
- Are SMOG, Fry, Dale-Chall and Gunning Fog included?
- This tool calculates Flesch-Kincaid grade, Flesch reading ease, Coleman-Liau and ARI. It does not calculate SMOG, Fry graphs, Dale-Chall, Gunning Fog or an aggregate consensus score. Their formula names do not refer to interchangeable scores.
- Can I score Spanish text or use it inside Microsoft Word?
- The four formulas and syllable heuristic are intended for English. There is no Word add-in or document upload. Copy the English passage from your document and paste it here; the tool cannot reproduce Word’s exact tokenization and pronunciation rules.
Arithmetic follows the four printed formulas and the counting rules shown. English syllables are estimated by a heuristic rather than a dictionary, so Flesch-Kincaid grade and reading ease can differ from other checkers. Correct any word’s syllable count by hand. These scores describe text, not a reader’s ability.