Alexandre Dumas · 1802
Heavy going at CET-4 level. Not unreadable — just not readable the look-every-word-up way.
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 686 of them.
Advanced — read it with glosses. 230,737 words in total; at 150 words a minute for a non-native reader, about 25 h 38 min to finish. Average sentence length 14.8 words. Reaching 95% coverage on this book (the floor for readability) takes roughly 18,750 word families.
The opening of The three musketeers, 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.
On the first Monday of the month of April, 1625, the market town of Meung, in which the author of _Romance of the Rose_ was born, appeared to be in as perfect a state of revolution as if the Huguenots had just made a second La Rochelle of it. Many citizens, seeing the women flying toward the High Street, leaving their children crying at the open doors, hastened to don the cuirass, and supporting their somewhat uncertain courage with a musket or a partisan, directed their steps toward the hostelry of the Jolly Miller, before which was gathered, increasing every minute, a compact group, vociferous and full of curiosity.
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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 measured against the CET-4 ∪ Gaokao lists, so this is difficulty for a Chinese-speaking learner, not a native-child reading level.