Readability Score Checker
Check any web page or pasted text and see how easy it is to read. You get a Flesch Reading Ease score, seven readability formulas, a consensus grade level, reading time, and your text with the long sentences, passive voice and complex words marked.
- Seven readability formulas
- Hard sentences highlighted
- Works on a URL or pasted text
Counting words too? Try the Website Word Counter, or see the keywords a page uses with the Keyword Extractor.
What the readability numbers mean
Flesch Reading Ease is the headline score. The grade formulas tell you the school level a reader needs.
| Flesch score | Reads as | Grade level |
|---|---|---|
| 90 to 100 | Very easy: understood by an average 11-year-old | 5th grade |
| 80 to 90 | Easy: conversational English | 6th grade |
| 70 to 80 | Fairly easy | 7th grade |
| 60 to 70 | Plain English: easy for most readers | 8th to 9th grade |
| 50 to 60 | Fairly difficult | 10th to 12th grade |
| 30 to 50 | Difficult | College |
| 0 to 30 | Very difficult | College graduate |
More than one number
A single formula can mislead, so the checker shows seven and a plain-English verdict.
Flesch Reading Ease
Sentence length and syllables per word, scored from 0 to 100. Higher is easier.
Grade level
Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau, ARI and Linsear Write, averaged into one consensus grade.
Reading time
How long an adult takes to read the text silently, and to say it aloud.
Sentence length
The share of sentences over 20 words, a chart of every sentence, and the longest ones to fix first.
Passive voice
Sentences built as "was fixed by" instead of "fixed", detected by pattern.
Complex words
Words of three or more syllables, plus wordy phrases with shorter alternatives.
How to check readability
Three steps.
Add your text
Enter a page address, or paste your text. For a page, menus and headings are left out.
Pick your audience
Choose who you are writing for, so the checker can tell you whether the text is too hard or fine.
Fix the marked parts
Split the yellow and red sentences, swap complex words and cut passive phrases, then check again.
What a readability score can and cannot tell you
Use it as a writing aid, not a ranking tool.
Not a ranking factor
Google has said it does not use a readability score. Clear writing helps people stay and act, and that is what you are checking.
English only
These formulas were built for English. Other languages give meaningless numbers, and the tool warns you.
Know your audience
A legal guide can be harder than a how-to page. Choose the audience, and aim for the grade that fits it.
Lists and headings
Short lines without end punctuation are left out, so menus and headings do not skew the score.
Short samples
Under about 100 words a score is rough. Check a whole page or article, not one paragraph.
You are the editor
Passive voice and complex words are detected by pattern. Keep a technical term when it is the right word.
What a readability score measures and what it does not
A readability score is a number that estimates how hard a piece of English text is to read. The best known is Flesch Reading Ease. It uses only two inputs: the average number of words per sentence and the average number of syllables per word. Short sentences and short words push the score up, and long sentences and long words push it down. Grade-level formulas such as Flesch-Kincaid use similar inputs and convert them to a school grade.
Because the formulas count only sentence and word length, they cannot judge meaning, accuracy, structure or tone. They were designed for English, so they give meaningless results for Nepali in Devanagari script and for other languages. They are best used as a writing aid. Google's helpful content guidance asks whether content is well produced and free of stylistic problems, but Google documents no readability score among its ranking systems, so there is no number to chase.
Reading level still matters for people. Accessibility guidance in WCAG success criterion 3.1.5 suggests supplemental content when text needs reading ability beyond lower secondary education. This checker shows seven formulas, marks long sentences, passive phrases and complex words, and lets you pick an audience so you can see where a page is harder than it needs to be.
When to check readability
Check readability when the audience is wide, the topic is dense, or several people write for the same site.
Before publishing an article
Paste the draft and look at the marked sentences. Splitting the longest ones and swapping a few heavy words usually lifts the score without changing the message.
Simplifying expert content
Medical, legal, finance and technical pages are often written by specialists for specialists. Use the grade level to find where a general reader will get lost.
Keeping several writers consistent
When a team or freelancers share a blog, run the same check on each piece. It shows which articles read very differently from the rest.
Comparing with competing pages
Enter a page that ranks for your target query and check its level. If it reads at a plain-English level and yours reads far harder, readers may leave sooner.
Accessibility reviews
Use the grade and the long-sentence chart as one input when judging whether a page meets the needs of people with lower reading ability or with English as a second language.
Planning page and content length
Reading time shows how long a page takes to read silently and aloud. It helps when planning a newsletter, a video script or the length of a landing page.
Readability mistakes and how to fix them
Most readability problems are about habits, not about the score.
Writing to the score
What goes wrong: Chopping every sentence into a fragment raises the number but makes the text choppy and hard to follow, which is the opposite of readable.
The fix: Vary sentence length. Split only the long, tangled ones that the tool marks, and read the result aloud to check that it still flows.
Scoring Nepali or other non-English text
What goes wrong: The formulas count English syllables and sentence patterns. Applied to Nepali in Devanagari or to another language, the numbers mean nothing.
The fix: Use this tool only for English text. For Nepali pages, ask a native editor to judge clarity, and keep sentences short and words common.
Judging a tiny sample
What goes wrong: A single paragraph is too short for a stable score, so one long sentence can swing the grade by several levels.
The fix: Check a full article or page, ideally more than a few hundred words, and look at the pattern across formulas, not at one number.
Removing the right technical word
What goes wrong: Swapping every long word for a short one can make writing vague, or wrong. A term such as "canonical" or "hreflang" may be exactly what your reader needs.
The fix: Keep necessary terms, and explain them once in plain words the first time they appear, or link to a short definition.
Counting menus and headings as sentences
What goes wrong: Menu items, buttons and headings have no end punctuation. If they are counted as sentences, they pull the average sentence length down and flatter the score.
The fix: Check the main text only. The tool skips short lines (under nine words) with no end punctuation, but it is still best to paste only the body copy.
Fixing readability but not structure
What goes wrong: A page can score well and still be a wall of text, with no headings, lists or short paragraphs to help readers find what they need.
The fix: Add descriptive headings, short paragraphs and lists where the content is a set of steps or items, then check the outline with the Heading Checker.
Readability terms explained
- Flesch Reading Ease
- A score from about 0 to 100 based on words per sentence and syllables per word. Higher means easier. The formula is 206.835 minus 1.015 times average sentence length, minus 84.6 times syllables per word.
- Flesch-Kincaid grade level
- A formula that turns sentence length and syllables per word into a United States school grade. A result of 8 suggests the text suits readers at roughly eighth-grade level.
- Consensus grade
- The average of the grade-level formulas the tool runs: Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, Coleman-Liau, ARI and Linsear Write, plus SMOG once the text has at least 10 sentences. Averaging smooths out the quirks of any single formula.
- Syllable
- A unit of sound in a word, such as "read-a-bil-i-ty". Formulas estimate syllables by rules, so names, numbers and unusual words can be miscounted.
- Passive voice
- A sentence where the subject receives the action, as in "the page was fixed by the team". The tool finds it by pattern and may flag some adjectives by mistake.
- Complex word
- A word of three or more syllables, not counting proper nouns, acronyms or a plain -ing, -ed or -es ending. Some are needed and fine. The tool lists them so you can swap the ones with a shorter, equally accurate alternative.
- Reading time
- An estimate of how long an adult takes to read the text silently, based on a fixed average speed, plus a separate estimate for reading it aloud.
- Lower secondary reading level
- The reading ability WCAG 3.1.5 uses as its benchmark. Text that needs more than this should come with supplemental content, such as a summary or illustrations.
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Built by
Madhav Kushwaha
Most readability tools give you one number and no way to act on it. I wanted something that shows where the hard sentences are, what to change and how the page compares with its audience. I use it on my own articles before publishing them, and I check it against known reference values so the formulas are right.
Readability Score Checker: Frequently Asked Questions
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