Charles Dickens · 1861
About one unknown word every twelve at a 5,000-word vocabulary. Readable, but it wants support — and that band is also where readers most easily fall into flow.
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 553 of them.
Comfortable from about 8,000 words, or read it with glosses. 185,493 words in total; at 150 words a minute for a non-native reader, about 20 h 37 min to finish. Average sentence length 17.2 words. Reaching 95% coverage on this book (the floor for readability) takes roughly 9,750 word families.
The opening of Great Expectations, 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.
My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.
I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister,—Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones.
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These are already built, and closest in difficulty to Great Expectations.
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.