Frances Hodgson Burnett · 1911
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 189 of them.
Finishable at 5,000 words, with the odd lookup. 81,103 words in total; at 150 words a minute for a non-native reader, about 9 h 1 min to finish. Average sentence length 12.8 words — short sentences, brisk pace. Reaching 95% coverage on this book (the floor for readability) takes roughly 7,000 word families.
The opening of The Secret Garden, 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.
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another. Her father had held a position under the English Government and had always been busy and ill himself, and her mother had been a great beauty who cared only to go to parties and amuse herself with gay people. She had not wanted a little girl at all, and when Mary was born she handed her over to the care of an Ayah, who was made to understand that if she wished to please the Mem Sahib she must keep the child out of sight as much as possible.
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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.