Four scores at once, because they disagree and the disagreement tells you something. Free, unlimited, and entirely in your browser.
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Two things. How long your sentences are, and how long your words are. That is the whole of it — every formula above is those two numbers weighted differently and dressed up as a grade level.
Which is why they diverge. Coleman-Liau counts letters rather than syllables, so a text full of short but unfamiliar words scores differently there than on Flesch-Kincaid. Gunning Fog cares specifically about words of three syllables or more. When they disagree, you have written something lopsided — usually short sentences made of long words, or the reverse.
Flesch Reading Ease
0 to 100, higher is easier. 60–70 is plain English; a broadsheet leader sits around 40; a legal contract lands near 20.
Flesch-Kincaid Grade
The same arithmetic rearranged into US school years. Roughly, the number of years of education a reader needs.
Gunning Fog
Weights three-syllable words heavily. Useful for spotting technical vocabulary that shorter formulas miss.
Coleman-Liau
Uses characters instead of syllables, so it is not affected by syllable-counting errors. A good sanity check on the others.
You can raise any of these scores in ten minutes by cutting every sentence in half. The score will go up. The writing will get worse — because the subordinate clauses you removed were where the relationships between your ideas lived, and now the reader has to work them out unaided.
The formulas cannot see meaning. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously scores as beautifully readable. So does a paragraph of confident nonsense, and so does a page that contradicts itself twice.
Use the number as a flag, not a target. A score much higher than you expected usually means a long sentence you did not notice writing, or a piece of jargon you have stopped hearing. Go and look at those. Do not sand the prose down until the number is pretty.
Something everyone should understand
Aim for grade 8 or below. Public health information, safety instructions, anything with a legal duty to be understood.
General audience writing
Grade 8 to 12. Journalism, most non-fiction, a blog post, an email to a customer.
Professional and technical
Grade 12 to 16. A report for colleagues, a policy document, a brief for people who share your vocabulary.
Academic and specialist
Above 16, and that is fine. A paper written for twelve people does not need to be readable by everyone.
Worth saying that a high score is not a failing. Writing for specialists in their own vocabulary is efficient — the problem is only ever writing that way for people who do not share it.
For how long rather than how hard, see reading time. If the score sent you looking for a sentence to fix, Simple mode rewrites a passage for a general reader, and the word cloud finds the jargon you have stopped noticing.
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Word Counter
Words, characters, sentences and reading time, live.
Case Converter
Upper, lower, and Title Case done properly.
Word Cloud
Which words you actually lean on.
Word Unscrambler
Every valid word in a jumble of letters.
Reading Time
How long a piece takes to read.
Citation Generator
APA, MLA, Chicago and Harvard.
Essay Counter
Word goals and progress for longer drafts.
X / Twitter Counter
Weighted counting and the real limits.
Instagram Counter
Where your caption gets truncated.