Readii

How hard is Wuthering Heights?

Emily Brontë · 1847

Hard

Roughly one unknown word in ten. Looking each one up will stall you; this one wants glosses that appear in place.

L19Readii reading level / 20
10.7Unknown words per 100 at 5,000 words
89.3%Covered by the top 5,000 words
116,513Total words
6,252Word families
12 h 57 minEstimated reading time

How much each vocabulary size covers

Top 1,000 words 78.4%
Top 3,000 words 86.1%
Top 5,000 words 89.3%
Top 10,000 words 93.2%

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 210 of them.

Who this book suits

Advanced — read it with glosses. 116,513 words in total; at 150 words a minute for a non-native reader, about 12 h 57 min to finish. Average sentence length 16.1 words. Reaching 95% coverage on this book (the floor for readability) takes roughly 14,500 word families.

Read a bit of it first

The opening of Wuthering Heights, 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.

1801—I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s Heaven—and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. A capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat, as I announced my name.

“Mr. Heathcliff?” I said.

A nod was the answer.

“Mr. Lockwood, your new tenant, sir. I do myself the honour of calling as soon as possible after my arrival, to express the hope that I have not inconvenienced you by my perseverance in soliciting the occupation of Thrushcross Grange: I heard yesterday you had had some thoughts—”

“Thrushcross Grange is my own, sir,” he interrupted, wincing. “I should not allow any one to inconvenience me, if I could hinder it—walk in!”

👆 Tap any word to try it

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These are already built, and closest in difficulty to Wuthering Heights.

L16The Time MachineH. G. Wells11L16The Great GatsbyF. Scott Fitzgerald8.1L14Peter PanJ. M. Barrie7

Books next to it in difficulty

Ordered by unknown words per 100. Lower reads easier; to step up a level, pick a higher number.

L17The Wind in the WillowsKenneth Grahame10.5L17War and PeaceLeo Tolstoy10.5L17The Sea-WolfJack London10.5L19The Autobiography of Benjamin FranklinBenjamin Franklin10.8L17A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManJames Joyce10.9L16The Time MachineH. G. Wells11
Which of these can I actually read? → See all 116 books compared → Readii home →

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.