Paste English text for 6 readability scores and a list of long sentences. Nothing leaves your browser.
A readability checker estimates how hard English text is to read from simple counts: how many words are in each sentence, how many syllables are in each word, and how many letters. The Flesch Reading Ease score is 206.835 minus 1.015 times the words per sentence, minus 84.6 times the syllables per word. Higher means easier. For example, The cat sat on the mat. The dog ran to the park. has 12 words, 2 sentences and 12 syllables, so it scores 206.835 minus 6.09 minus 84.6, which is 116.1. The score is not limited to 0 to 100, so very simple text can pass 100 and very dense text can go below 0. The other five scores give a US school grade: Flesch-Kincaid grade is 0.39 times the words per sentence plus 11.8 times the syllables per word minus 15.59. They all measure length, not meaning, so a short sentence full of jargon still scores as easy.
Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid grade use sentence length and syllables. Gunning Fog is 0.4 times the sum of the words per sentence and 100 times the share of words with 3 or more syllables; this tool leaves out capitalised words in the middle of a sentence, as a stand-in for proper nouns. SMOG is 1.043 times the square root of the count of words with 3 or more syllables, scaled to 30 sentences, plus 3.1291. It was designed for samples of at least 30 sentences, so on a shorter text the tool still shows a number and warns that it is rough. Coleman-Liau and the Automated Readability Index use letters instead of syllables, so they do not depend on the syllable guess. When the scores disagree by a grade or two, that is normal: each weighs different things.
A word is a run of English letters, which may contain an apostrophe or a hyphen, or a number such as 2026 or 3.14. Numbers count as one word of one syllable. A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark followed by a space or the end of the text, and also at a blank line, so headings and list items separated by blank lines count as their own sentences. Mr, Mrs, Dr, e.g. and a few other abbreviations do not end a sentence. Syllables come from a rule-based guess, not a dictionary: it counts groups of vowels and adjusts for silent endings such as make or jumped. It is right for most everyday words and wrong for some. Science and being come out as 1 syllable, and audience as 2. Over a whole text these errors are small, but they move the scores by a fraction of a grade.
This tool reads English only. Text in other languages is not scored, and the formulas were fitted to English. It does not check grammar, tone or whether a word is common, and scores for fewer than 100 words are rough. Reading time divides the word count by the speed you choose, 200 words per minute at first; it is not measured on you. The long sentence list shows every sentence over the word limit you set, 25 by default, up to 200 of them. The text is processed in your browser, in this tab. It is not uploaded, saved or put in the page address. Text up to 1,000,000 characters is handled.
It depends on the reader. In the commonly published table, 60 to 70 is plain English that suits 8th to 9th grade readers, 80 to 90 is easy and 30 to 50 is difficult. The table on this page marks the band your text falls in.
Count the words, sentences and syllables, then compute 206.835 - 1.015 x (words / sentences) - 84.6 x (syllables / words). For 12 words, 2 sentences and 12 syllables that is 206.835 - 6.09 - 84.6 = 116.1. The tool shows all three counts so you can check it.
SMOG was designed for at least 30 sentences. On a 10-sentence sample the count of long words is too small to be stable, so the tool still shows a number but adds a warning. Use Flesch-Kincaid or Coleman-Liau for short texts.
It is a guess made from vowel groups and endings, so it is exact for words such as table or jumped and off by one for words such as science or audience. Coleman-Liau and the Automated Readability Index count letters instead, so they do not use it.
No. The formulas were built for English, and the syllable rules only cover English spelling. Text in another language will give a number, but it is not meaningful. A text with no English letters shows a message instead of scores.
No. The text is processed in your browser, in this tab, and no server receives it. Your choices, such as the sentence length limit, are saved in this browser, but the text is not. Google Analytics counts visits, results and copy presses, never the text.