Jules Verne · 1873
Roughly one unknown word in ten. Looking each one up will stall you; this one wants glosses that appear in place.
Coverage = the share of words in the text you already know. The research gives two lines: 98% before independent fluent reading is realistic, 95% for the instructional level that needs support (Hu & Nation, 2000). Proper nouns are not counted as unknown — recognising that it is a name is enough; this book has 574 of them.
Advanced — read it with glosses. 63,424 words in total; at 150 words a minute for a non-native reader, about 7 h 3 min to finish. Average sentence length 15.4 words. Reaching 95% coverage on this book (the floor for readability) takes roughly 13,500 word families.
The opening of Around the World in Eighty Days, word for word. Tap any word you don't know and its meaning here appears beside it — no sign-up, tap as often as you like.
Mr. Phileas Fogg lived, in 1872, at No. 7, Saville Row, Burlington Gardens, the house in which Sheridan died in 1814. He was one of the most noticeable members of the Reform Club, though he seemed always to avoid attracting attention; an enigmatical personage, about whom little was known, except that he was a polished man of the world. People said that he resembled Byron—at least that his head was Byronic; but he was a bearded, tranquil Byron, who might live on a thousand years without growing old.
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These are already built, and closest in difficulty to Around the World in Eighty Days.
Ordered by unknown words per 100. Lower reads easier; to step up a level, pick a higher number.
Computed by Readii from the public-domain text (updated 2026-10-21), not estimated by hand. The Readii reading level is our own scale, anchored on unknown-word density; it is not the same system as Lexile or AR and does not convert directly. Unknown words are counted against a frequency list built from a large subtitle corpus, so the bands mean the same thing for any learner of English, whatever your first language. This is difficulty for a non-native reader, not a native-child reading level.