Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 1821
5–8 unknown words per 100 at CET-4 level. 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 520 of them.
CET-6 and up, or read it with glosses. 243,832 words in total; at 150 words a minute for a non-native reader, about 27 h 6 min to finish. Average sentence length 14.7 words. Reaching 95% coverage on this book (the floor for readability) takes roughly 13,000 word families.
The opening of The Idiot, 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.
Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at nine o’clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed. The morning was so damp and misty that it was only with great difficulty that the day succeeded in breaking; and it was impossible to distinguish anything more than a few yards away from the carriage windows.
Some of the passengers by this particular train were returning from abroad; but the third-class carriages were the best filled, chiefly with insignificant persons of various occupations and degrees, picked up at the different stations nearer town. All of them seemed weary, and most of them had sleepy eyes and a shivering expression, while their complexions generally appeared to have taken on the colour of the fog outside.
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These are already built, and closest in difficulty to The Idiot.
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 measured against the CET-4 ∪ Gaokao lists, so this is difficulty for a Chinese-speaking learner, not a native-child reading level.