Louisa May Alcott · 1868
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 706 of them.
Comfortable from about 8,000 words, or read it with glosses. 186,262 words in total; at 150 words a minute for a non-native reader, about 20 h 42 min to finish. Average sentence length 18.3 words. Reaching 95% coverage on this book (the floor for readability) takes roughly 9,000 word families.
The opening of Little Women, 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.
“I don’t think it’s fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all,” added little Amy, with an injured sniff.
“We’ve got Father and Mother, and each other,” said Beth contentedly from her corner.
The four young faces on which the firelight shone brightened at the cheerful words, but darkened again as Jo said sadly, “We haven’t got Father, and shall not have him for a long time.” She didn’t say “perhaps never,” but each silently added it, thinking of Father far away, where the fighting was.
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These are already built, and closest in difficulty to Little Women.
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.