CEFR level checker for any text
Paste a link or some text and get its English level, the words above that level, and exercises built from its own sentences. Free, no signup, works on a phone.
A link or pasted text. Takes about four seconds and asks for nothing.
What the six levels mean
| Level | Called | What you can read |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | Beginner | Signs, menus, very short simple notes |
| A2 | Elementary | Short factual texts, simple personal letters |
| B1 | Intermediate | Straightforward news, everyday work documents |
| B2 | Upper-intermediate | Most journalism, general non-fiction |
| C1 | Advanced | Opinion, literary prose, specialist reporting |
| C2 | Proficient | Academic and legal writing, anything at all |
Worth knowing: CEFR describes what a person can do. Applying it to a text is a useful stretch of the idea, not its original purpose — which is why every tool that does this gives slightly different answers.
How a text gets graded
Two signals carry most of the weight, and neither works alone.
Vocabulary frequency
English is extremely top-heavy. The most frequent 1,000 words cover roughly three-quarters of ordinary text; the first 3,000 get you most of the way through a newspaper. So the question isn't "are there long words" but "what proportion of this falls outside the common core".
Sentence length
Longer sentences carry more subordinate clauses, and holding several clauses in your head at once is a separate skill from knowing words. A text of familiar vocabulary in forty-word sentences is genuinely harder than the same ideas in fifteen-word ones.
Vocabulary alone is fooled by a simple text about an unusual subject — a children's article about volcanoes scores as advanced because of "magma". Sentence length alone is fooled by a long sentence built entirely from easy words. Used together they disagree far less often.
How accurate is it, honestly
For ranking — is this harder than that — it's reliable. For a single absolute grade, treat it as accurate within about half a level. B2 could reasonably be a hard B1 or an easy C1.
The thing no automatic checker measures is conceptual difficulty. A philosophy paragraph written in plain short words can be far harder than a news report full of long ones. Idiom does the same thing: "he threw in the towel" is five very common words and completely opaque if you haven't met it.
So use it to choose between articles, not to argue with a teacher.
What to do with the number
The practical rule from extensive-reading research: you want to know about 95% of the words — roughly one unknown every two lines. That's the level where you can guess from context and still finish, which is the only way a reading habit survives past a fortnight.
So pick texts at your level or one step above. Anything higher is study; anything lower is revision. Both have a place, but reading for pleasure lives in that narrow band, and it's where almost all vocabulary growth actually happens.
There's a full method in learning English from news articles.
For teachers
The checker takes a URL, so you can level an article before assigning it and hand the class a link rather than a photocopy. It also generates vocabulary, gap-fill and error-spotting exercises from the same text — the sentences are real published English, so the correct answers are always idiomatic, which is the thing textbook exercises most often get wrong.
No account needed, for you or for them.
Paste a link. Get the level, the words above it, and three exercises built from the text.