Kenneth Grahame · 1908
Roughly one unknown word in ten. 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 163 of them.
Advanced — read it with glosses. 58,853 words in total; at 150 words a minute for a non-native reader, about 6 h 32 min to finish. Average sentence length 18.2 words. Reaching 95% coverage on this book (the floor for readability) takes roughly 14,500 word families.
The opening of The Wind in the Willows, 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.
The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said “Bother!” and “O blow!” and also “Hang spring-cleaning!” and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, “Up we go! Up we go!” till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.
👆 Tap any word to try it
The numbers above are computed, but we haven't cut The Wind in the Willows into passages yet.
If you have the ebook, upload it — ready in a few minutes, same three-minute passages, same tap-a-word glosses.
Uploading your own book is part of Readii Pro (£3.99/week, £1.96 for the first four weeks, cancel anytime).
These are already built, and closest in difficulty to The Wind in the Willows.
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.