Calculate the Flesch Kincaid grade level of your text
This calculator gives the Flesch Kincaid grade level and the Flesch Reading Ease score of English text. It counts words, sentences and syllables and applies both formulas. You see the scores and the counts behind them, so it is clear what drives the result.
The formulas
ASL = words ÷ sentences (average sentence length)
ASW = syllables ÷ words (average syllables per word)
Grade level = 0.39 × ASL + 11.8 × ASW − 15.59
Reading ease = 206.835 − 1.015 × ASL − 84.6 × ASWRudolf Flesch published the Reading Ease formula in 1948. J. Peter Kincaid and colleagues derived the grade-level version in 1975 for the US Navy. The grade level is a US school grade: 8.0 suggests a typical eighth grader can follow the text. Reading ease runs the other way, and higher means easier.
Worked example
Readability formulas estimate how hard a text is to understand.
They look at sentence length and word length. Shorter sentences
and simpler words make reading easier for everyone.
Words 28, sentences 3, syllables 46
ASL = 28 ÷ 3 = 9.33 ASW = 46 ÷ 28 = 1.64
Grade = 0.39 × 9.33 + 11.8 × 1.64 − 15.59 = 7.4
Ease = 206.835 − 1.015 × 9.33 − 84.6 × 1.64 = 58.4The sentences are short, but words like "readability" (five syllables) and "formulas" push the syllable average up. That is why the ease score is below 60 even though the grade is about seventh grade.
Reading ease bands
| Score | Description |
|---|---|
| 90–100 | Very easy (5th grade) |
| 80–89 | Easy (6th grade) |
| 70–79 | Fairly easy (7th grade) |
| 60–69 | Plain English (8th–9th grade) |
| 50–59 | Fairly difficult (10th–12th grade) |
| 30–49 | Difficult (college) |
| 0–29 | Very difficult (college graduate) |
How words, sentences and syllables are counted
Syllables are estimated by rule, not looked up in a dictionary. The tool counts groups of vowels (a, e, i, o, u and y) after dropping common silent endings such as -e, -es and -ed, and it treats words of three letters or fewer as one syllable. That works for most words but not all: "created" is counted as 1 syllable instead of 3, and "poem" as 1 instead of 2. Over a few hundred words such errors mostly even out, but short samples can shift noticeably.
A sentence ends at a period, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis followed by a space and a capital letter, digit or quote. Abbreviations can add false sentences: "Dr. Smith" counts as two. Lines without end punctuation, like headings or list items, merge into one long sentence and raise the grade.
Reading the results sensibly
- Scores can leave the usual range: "The cat sat on the mat. It was a warm day." gets a grade of −1.6 and an ease of 116.7.
- The formulas measure length, not meaning. Short words in a confusing order still score well.
To lower the grade, split long sentences and replace long words with shorter ones. The sentence counter lists each detected sentence, the word counter shows average sentence length, and the word frequency counter helps spot overused terms.
Privacy
The processing runs entirely in your browser. The text you enter is not uploaded to a server.