Herman Melville · 1851
More than one unknown word in eight. Not unreadable — just not readable the look-every-word-up way. Start by accepting you will not follow every sentence.
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 1,421 of them.
Advanced — read it with glosses. 214,051 words in total; at 150 words a minute for a non-native reader, about 23 h 47 min to finish. Average sentence length 20.7 words. This book is heavy on rare, archaic and invented words: even 25,000 high-frequency word families will not reach 95% coverage — its difficulty is not in the common vocabulary.
The opening of Moby-Dick, 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.
Loomings.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.
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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.