What is a good Flesch Reading Ease score?

It depends on your audience. For the general public, aim for 60–70 — that's plain English at roughly an 8th- to 9th-grade level, where most newspapers and consumer writing live. Scores above 80 read like a children's book or a friendly chat; scores below 50 are college-level and below 30 are dense academic or legal prose. There's no universal 'good': a tax form at 40 is fine for accountants, but a 40 on a landing page meant for everyone will lose readers. Match the score to who's reading.

Why do the six scores disagree with each other?

Because they measure different things. Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, and SMOG count how many words have three or more syllables, so they punish long vocabulary. Coleman-Liau and the Automated Readability Index ignore syllables entirely and count letters and characters per word instead, which is more reliable on text full of acronyms or numbers. A gap between the two groups is informative: if Fog and SMOG are high but Coleman-Liau is low, your sentences are fine but your word choice is heavy. Read them as a panel, not a single verdict.

Does this work for Chinese or Japanese text?

No, and that's a hard limitation, not a bug. Every formula here is English-specific: they count vowel-based syllables and split words on spaces. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing has no spaces between words and no vowel-syllable structure, so a Chinese paragraph would register as one enormous 'word' and produce a nonsense score. The tool detects when your input is mostly CJK and shows a warning instead. For Chinese readability, editors look at average sentence length, the proportion of rare characters, and HSK level — different metrics entirely.

How is reading time calculated?

Words divided by 200, which is a common silent-reading speed for adults reading ordinary prose. It's a rough estimate, not a stopwatch: technical material with lots of long words reads slower, and skimming reads faster. A 600-word article comes out at about 3 minutes. If you need a precise word count for a 'X min read' badge, the count shown here is exact even if the time is an approximation.

How accurate is the syllable counting?

The tool uses the standard English heuristic — lowercase the word, drop a silent trailing 'e', and count runs of vowels as syllables. On ordinary prose it's about 85–90% accurate per word, occasionally miscounting words like 'jumped' (it sees one vowel group) or names. That's fine because the readability formulas were themselves calibrated against this kind of approximate counting, and the small per-word errors average out across a paragraph. The longer your sample, the more stable every score becomes.

Hit an 8th-grade reading level for a marketing page

You're writing a product landing page and your style guide says "8th-grade reading level." Paste the draft, read the Flesch-Kincaid Grade, and if it's at 11 you can see why: the average sentence is 24 words and a third of them are three syllables. Split the long sentences, swap "utilize" for "use", and watch the Flesch Reading Ease climb past 60. The score gives you a target to edit toward instead of guessing whether it "sounds clear."

Check that classroom material matches the grade you teach

A 6th-grade teacher pulls a reading passage off the web and isn't sure it's age-appropriate. Pasting it returns a SMOG of 9.4 and a Gunning Fog of 10 — too hard for most 11-year-olds. Now the teacher knows to either simplify the passage or save it for next year, with a number to back the decision in a lesson plan rather than a gut feeling.

Compare two headlines or email subject lines

Marketers test subject lines for open rate, but readability matters too. Paste version A, note the Flesch score, then paste version B. The one with shorter words and a tighter sentence usually scores 10–15 points higher on Reading Ease, which often tracks with skim-ability on a crowded inbox. It's a fast, objective tiebreaker when two lines feel equally good.

Tame a dense paragraph in a report or thesis

A student's discussion section reads at college-graduate level (Flesch below 30) and the advisor flagged it as "hard to follow." Paste the paragraph, see that the average is 2.1 syllables per word and 31 words per sentence, then break it into three sentences and prefer plain verbs. Re-paste to confirm the grade dropped two full levels — concrete proof the rewrite worked.

Set an honest "X min read" badge on a blog post

Before publishing a 1,400-word article, paste it to get an exact word count and a reading-time estimate (about 7 minutes at 200 wpm). Use the exact word count for your badge so it isn't a wild guess, and glance at the Flesch score: if a how-to post scores 45, it's denser than most readers want and a quick edit pass will widen your audience before it ever goes live.

Readability Score Checker — Flesch Reading Ease & Grade Level

Paste English text and get Flesch Reading Ease plus five grade-level scores, syllable counts, and reading time — runs entirely in your browser

Runs locally
Category Text
Best for Removing repetitive cleanup work from everyday writing and operations.

Paste English text

Type or paste some English text above to see its readability scores.

Need just a word & character count? Use the Word Counter →

All six formulas are English-only and run entirely in your browser.

What this tool does

Paste a paragraph, an article, or an email draft and this tool grades it the way editors and teachers do: with six standard readability formulas. The headline number is Flesch Reading Ease (0–100, higher means easier — 60–70 is plain English a 13- to 15-year-old reads without effort). Below it you get five grade-level scores that each answer "which US school grade can read this comfortably?": Flesch-Kincaid Grade, Gunning Fog, the SMOG index, Coleman-Liau, and the Automated Readability Index. They disagree by design — Coleman-Liau and ARI count letters and characters, while Fog and SMOG count multisyllable words, so seeing all six together tells you whether your text is hard because of long sentences or because of long words. You also get the raw numbers the formulas are built on: characters, words, sentences, syllables, average sentence length, average syllables per word, and an estimated reading time at 200 words per minute. Everything is computed live as you type. One honest caveat up front: these formulas were built for English and only English — they count vowels and spaces, which Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text don't use, so the tool detects CJK input and warns you instead of printing a meaningless score. Nothing you paste leaves your browser.

Tool details

Input: Text; The page exposes text boxes, numeric controls, file pickers, or structured inputs depending on the tool.
Output: Live result + Copy; The result area focuses on usable output, with copy, download, or preview actions when supported.
Privacy: Browser-side processing; The main tool logic does not call an external API, so inputs normally stay in the current tab.
Save / share: Local preference storage; Preferences, history, or drafts are saved in this browser without an account.
Performance budget: Initial JS <= 11 KB; No WASM budget is declared, keeping the tool quick to open on mobile.
Best fit: Text · Content Creator; Category and role tags drive related tools, internal links, and quick fit checks.

How to use

1. Input

Paste or drop your content into the tool panel.
2. Process

Click the button. All processing is local in your browser.
3. Copy / Download

Copy the result or download to disk in one click.

How Readability Score Checker fits into your work

Use it to clean, compare, reshape, or extract plain text before it goes into a document, CMS, spreadsheet, or prompt.

Text jobs

Removing repetitive cleanup work from everyday writing and operations.
Making text easier to compare, paste, publish, or feed into another tool.
Working with content locally when the text is private or unfinished.

Text checks

Scan for unintended whitespace, duplicate lines, and lost punctuation.
For long text, test the first few lines before applying the whole change.
Copy the final output only after checking the preview.

Good next steps

These links move the current task into a more complete workflow.

Real-world use cases

Hit an 8th-grade reading level for a marketing page
You're writing a product landing page and your style guide says "8th-grade reading level." Paste the draft, read the Flesch-Kincaid Grade, and if it's at 11 you can see why: the average sentence is 24 words and a third of them are three syllables. Split the long sentences, swap "utilize" for "use", and watch the Flesch Reading Ease climb past 60. The score gives you a target to edit toward instead of guessing whether it "sounds clear."
Check that classroom material matches the grade you teach
A 6th-grade teacher pulls a reading passage off the web and isn't sure it's age-appropriate. Pasting it returns a SMOG of 9.4 and a Gunning Fog of 10 — too hard for most 11-year-olds. Now the teacher knows to either simplify the passage or save it for next year, with a number to back the decision in a lesson plan rather than a gut feeling.
Compare two headlines or email subject lines
Marketers test subject lines for open rate, but readability matters too. Paste version A, note the Flesch score, then paste version B. The one with shorter words and a tighter sentence usually scores 10–15 points higher on Reading Ease, which often tracks with skim-ability on a crowded inbox. It's a fast, objective tiebreaker when two lines feel equally good.
Tame a dense paragraph in a report or thesis
A student's discussion section reads at college-graduate level (Flesch below 30) and the advisor flagged it as "hard to follow." Paste the paragraph, see that the average is 2.1 syllables per word and 31 words per sentence, then break it into three sentences and prefer plain verbs. Re-paste to confirm the grade dropped two full levels — concrete proof the rewrite worked.
Set an honest "X min read" badge on a blog post
Before publishing a 1,400-word article, paste it to get an exact word count and a reading-time estimate (about 7 minutes at 200 wpm). Use the exact word count for your badge so it isn't a wild guess, and glance at the Flesch score: if a how-to post scores 45, it's denser than most readers want and a quick edit pass will widen your audience before it ever goes live.

Common pitfalls

Running Chinese, Japanese, or other non-Latin text through it and trusting the number. The formulas count vowels and spaces; CJK text has neither, so the score is meaningless. The tool warns you when it detects this — heed the warning and use language-appropriate metrics instead.
Treating a single formula as the verdict. The six scores measure different things and routinely disagree by two or three grade levels. Read them together: a high Fog with a low Coleman-Liau means long words, not long sentences. Cherry-picking the friendliest score just fools you.
Scoring three sentences and acting on it. These formulas are statistical and only stabilize on a decent sample. A 15-word snippet can swing wildly because one long word moves the average a lot. Paste at least a full paragraph, ideally 100+ words, before you trust the grade.

Privacy

Every calculation — all six readability formulas, the syllable counting, and the character and word counts — runs as plain JavaScript inside your browser tab. The text you paste is never uploaded, logged, or sent to any server, and there is no analytics on its contents. Because the input can be a whole article, it is deliberately not encoded into the URL, so there is no share link that could leak your draft into someone's access log. For convenience the tool keeps a copy of your current text in this browser's local storage so a refresh doesn't lose your work; clear the box or use your browser's site-data controls to remove it.

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Readability Score Checker — Flesch Reading Ease & Grade Level

What this tool does

Tool details

How to use

1. Input

2. Process

3. Copy / Download

How Readability Score Checker fits into your work

Text jobs

Text checks

Good next steps

Real-world use cases

Hit an 8th-grade reading level for a marketing page

Check that classroom material matches the grade you teach

Compare two headlines or email subject lines

Tame a dense paragraph in a report or thesis

Set an honest "X min read" badge on a blog post

Common pitfalls

Privacy

FAQ

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