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Flesch Reading Ease — higher is easier to read.
Most word counters stop at the number. This one keeps going: alongside words and characters it estimates how long the text takes to read aloud or silently, and it scores how hard the writing is using two well-established readability formulas. That matters if you're writing an essay to a length limit, a blog post you want people to actually finish, a school assignment with a grade-level target, or a social post that has to fit in a character cap.
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A word is any run of non-whitespace characters, so hyphenated terms like well-known count as one and numbers count as words. This matches how most editors and word processors tally a word count.
Sentences are counted by terminal punctuation — ., ! and ? — with runs like ?! treated as a single ending. Paragraphs are blocks of text separated by a blank line. Both are estimates: no counter can perfectly parse abbreviations like "Dr." or "e.g.", so treat these as close guides rather than exact truth.
Reading time divides the word count by a reading speed in words per minute. Silent adult reading of non-technical prose averages around 238 words a minute, which is the default here; you can switch it. Speaking time uses roughly 130 words a minute, a common pace for clear narration and presentations — handy for scripting a talk or a video.
This gives a score from roughly 0 to 100 where higher is easier. It rewards shorter sentences and shorter words. As a rough guide: 90–100 is very easy (5th grade), 60–70 is plain English most adults read comfortably, 30–50 reads like a dense academic paper, and below 30 is very difficult. Many publishers and style guides aim for 60 or above.
This converts the same sentence-length and syllable inputs into a U.S. school grade. A score of 8 means the text should be understandable by an average 8th-grader (about 13–14 years old). For broad public writing, aiming somewhere around grade 7–9 keeps things accessible without sounding childish.
Both formulas rely on counting syllables, which is estimated here with a standard vowel-group heuristic. It's very close for ordinary English but can be off on unusual names or invented words — so, again, a reliable guide rather than a precise measurement.
Trimming an essay to a word limit; checking a headline fits Twitter/X or an SMS; tightening a blog post so its reading time and grade level match the audience; counting words for a translation quote; or just seeing which words you lean on too often in the keyword-density list.