Text Readability Checker

What the Flesch Reading Ease score means

The Flesch Reading Ease score rates a text on a scale where higher is easier: roughly 90–100 is very easy (5th-grade reading level), 60–70 is plain, standard English, and anything below 30 is very difficult — the kind of dense prose you find in academic papers or legal contracts. It is computed from just two things: the average number of words per sentence and the average number of syllables per word. Shorter sentences and shorter words push the score up; long, winding sentences full of long words pull it down.

Reading-ease bands, at a glance

• 90–100 — very easy · 5th grade
• 80–90 — easy · 6th grade
• 70–80 — fairly easy · 7th grade
• 60–70 — standard · 8th–9th grade
• 50–60 — fairly difficult · 10th–12th grade
• 30–50 — difficult · college
• 0–30 — very difficult · college graduate

The other grade-level scores

Alongside Flesch Reading Ease this tool reports five grade-level formulas — Flesch–Kincaid, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman–Liau and the Automated Readability Index. Each estimates the US school grade a reader needs to understand the text on the first pass, but each weighs the ingredients differently: some count syllables, some count complex words (three or more syllables), and Coleman–Liau and ARI count characters instead of syllables, so they do not depend on the syllable heuristic at all. Reading them together gives a more robust picture than trusting any single number.

A note on language and privacy

These formulas — and the syllable count that several of them rely on — were calibrated for English. Applied to Romanian or another language they still produce numbers, and those numbers move in the right direction as text gets simpler or denser, but they should be read as a rough estimate rather than a real grade level. Reading time assumes 200 words per minute and speaking time 130 words per minute. Everything is computed in your browser as you type; your text is never uploaded or stored.