Bram Stoker · 1897
Reads steadily at a 5,000-word vocabulary. An unknown word here and there, usually carried by the sentence around it.
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 573 of them.
Finishable at 5,000 words, with the odd lookup. 160,717 words in total; at 150 words a minute for a non-native reader, about 17 h 51 min to finish. Average sentence length 18 words. Reaching 95% coverage on this book (the floor for readability) takes roughly 8,500 word families.
The opening of Dracula, 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.
How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief may stand forth as simple fact. There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them.
DRACULA
CHAPTER I
JONATHAN HARKER’S JOURNAL
(_Kept in shorthand._)
_3 May. Bistritz._--Left Munich at 8:35 P. M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible. The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.
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These are already built, and closest in difficulty to Dracula.
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.