Reading Level Checker

Six published readability formulas run at once: Flesch-Kincaid, Flesch Reading Ease, New Dale-Chall, Coleman-Liau, the Automated Readability Index, and Spache for early primary text. The number you see is the middle of those results. Running several rather than one matters, because each formula is blind in a different way. Two of them use no syllable counting at all, which makes them an honest check on the others.

No, and it would not be honest to pretend otherwise. Lexile is a proprietary measure owned by MetaMetrics, its formula is not public, and publishing Lexile numbers requires their written permission. Anything on the internet claiming to calculate a Lexile for free is guessing. The measures used here are open and published, and they line up closely with Lexile, but they are not the same number. If your district requires an actual Lexile, use the free Lexile Analyzer directly.

Treat it as a starting point for your own judgment, not a verdict. These formulas measure surface features, mostly sentence length and word difficulty, and infer reading level from them. They cannot tell whether a passage assumes background knowledge your students do not have, and they are unreliable on poetry, dialogue, song lyrics, and lists, where short lines read as short sentences. Simple words can also carry hard ideas. Hemingway scores at about a fourth grade level and is not a fourth grade book.

Below roughly 100 words these formulas produce noise. One long sentence or one unusual word swings the result by two grade levels. Rather than hand you a confident wrong answer, the tool tells you the passage is too short and still gives you the vocabulary list, which is reliable at any length.

Yes, and it stops at 25 words on purpose. The tool finds every word outside the familiar list, keeps the ones it can define in student-friendly language, then shows the 25 rarest of those with the page or paragraph where each one turns up. If the text produced more than 25, the count above the table says so. A list of 200 words is not a pre-teach list, and a row that admits it has no definition is not one you can hand to a class. Sort by where the words appear, by difficulty, or alphabetically, then print or copy the list for a warm-up or a word wall.

A word is flagged when it falls outside the Dale-Chall familiar word list, which is a long-established list of words most fourth graders already know. Inflected forms are matched back to their base word, so "carried" is not flagged when "carry" is familiar. Definitions come from a file built into this page, drawn from Princeton's WordNet and rewritten to be short and student-friendly. That file covers about 15,000 words, and anything outside it is left off the list, which is what keeps names, dialect spellings, and stray fragments from a PDF out of your handout. Nothing is looked up over the internet while you work, so the tool is fast and works the same every time.

No. The entire analysis happens inside your own browser. Whatever you paste, and any PDF you drop in, stays on your device. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or logged.

Yes. Press Print for a clean one-page handout with the reading level and the vocabulary list. In the print window choose "Save as PDF" as the destination if you would rather keep a file. There is also a Copy button that puts the whole analysis on your clipboard as plain text for a slide or a lesson plan.

Yes. Every tool on The Faculty Lounge is free, with no ads and no paid tier. If there is something you want added, tell us in the Forums or through the contact page.