Flesch Reading Ease Calculator

Scores of 60 to 70 read as plain, standard English for most adults. Above 80 is easy and suits a broad audience, while below 30 is very confusing and typically needs a college or graduate reader.

It uses the classic formula 206.835 minus 1.015 times words per sentence minus 84.6 times syllables per word. Fewer words per sentence and fewer syllables per word both push the number up.

Each word is lowercased, then runs of consecutive vowels (a, e, i, o, u and y) are counted as one syllable each. A silent trailing e is dropped, and every word is floored at one syllable.

Yes. The formula is not clamped, so a string of very short one syllable sentences can top 100, and long sentences packed with polysyllabic words can fall well below zero. Both are valid readings of the same math.

The syllable step is a heuristic that tends to over count vowel groups, so ordinary business or academic vocabulary raises syllables per word quickly. Long sentences make it worse, so trim both to lift the score.

No. It is a fast estimate, not a dictionary lookup. English spelling is irregular, so words like widely or every may be counted a syllable high, which nudges the score down slightly.

Yes. Alongside the Reading Ease number the tool lists Flesch-Kincaid Grade plus the Gunning Fog, Coleman-Liau, Automated Readability and SMOG grade indices, so you can cross check the single ease score.

Casing does not change the score. Punctuation matters only where it ends a sentence: periods, question marks and exclamation points mark sentence boundaries, and any text with none is treated as one sentence.

Yes. The score is computed entirely in your browser and nothing you paste is uploaded, logged or stored.