English text difficulty checker
Paste any English text into the checker and Beeblio instantly tells you how much of it falls within your vocabulary range. Every word is matched against frequency bands — 300, 800, 1,500, 3,000, 5,000, 8,000, and 12,000 most common words — so you can see at a glance whether a news article, short story, or textbook chapter is comfortably readable or a stretch beyond your current level.
The results show you the exact share of words at each band, a list of words you are likely meeting for the first time, and the rarest words in the text. Frequency ranks come from the wordfreq corpus, which draws on a wide range of real-world writing, so the numbers reflect the English people actually use.
A rough rule of thumb: once you recognise around the 1,500 most frequent words, you can understand about 80% of everyday text. Use the checker to pick reading material that keeps new vocabulary manageable — challenging enough to learn from, easy enough to stay enjoyable.
How it works
Paste a text in English (up to 6,000 characters). Every word is looked up in a frequency list; for each band — the top 300, 800, 1,500, 3,000, 5,000, 8,000 and 12,000 words — you see the share of the text a learner at that band already knows. Comprehensible reading sits around 95–98% known: we call ≥97% easy, 92–97% just right, 85–92% hard, and below that too hard.
You also get the new words worth learning (unknown but common, in frequency order) and the rare words — names, jargon, typos — that no learner should stop for.
Questions
How do I know if a text is the right level for me?
A good target is a text where you already know around 95% of the words — that leaves enough unknown words to stretch you without breaking your understanding. The checker shows your coverage at each frequency band so you can judge whether a text hits that sweet spot.
Where do the word frequency ranks come from?
Ranks are drawn from the wordfreq corpus, a large dataset built from diverse real-world text including books, websites, and subtitles. This means a word ranked highly is one you are genuinely likely to encounter often in everyday English.
Does the checker handle different forms of the same word, like 'run', 'runs', and 'running'?
Yes. Beeblio lemmatises words before looking them up, so 'runs' and 'running' are both counted under the base form 'run' and share the same frequency rank. This gives you a fairer picture of how much vocabulary you actually need.