Analyse your Text

The Lexile Analyzer® is a tool that allows you to determine the Lexile® measure of text – be that a newspaper or magazine article, short literary passage or even some of your own creative writing!

This works by evaluating the semantic difficulty (word frequency) and syntactic complexity (sentence length) of a body of text. The analyser splits the text into 125-word slices, compares each slice to the nearly 600-million-word Lexile corpus, taken from a variety of sources and genres, and counts the words in each sentence. These calculations are entered into the Lexile equation. The resulting Lexile measure for each text slice is then applied to a measurement model called the Rasch psychometric model which calculates the Lexile measure for the entire text.

Although this may sound very complicated, it’s all done automatically – transforming a complex process into a simple one and providing you with an unbelievable powerful outcome.

The Lexile Book Database already holds tens of thousands of professionally measured books, both fiction and nonfiction, allowing you to search for titles within a child’s Lexile range using the Find a Book feature. But what if the text you’re using in class isn’t yet in the database? What if you’ve found a great newspaper article for use in a lesson? Or have written your own text or worksheets to support a lesson?

This is where the Lexile Analyzer® comes in. It is a quick and easy way of:

checking that your text is at the right Lexile measure to ensure comprehension by all of the children in your class
creating different versions of a text, where necessary, to support different reading ability levels of the children you are teaching.

In other words, it gives you the knowledge and power to adapt text for any age and any subject, to ensure all children in your class will truly understand and comprehend the text. Personalised learning doesn’t get much better than that!

To register

This tool is intended for use by teachers and other individuals to help them target their writing to a specific audience. If you would like to make use of this exciting and powerful tool, simply register on the top right panel of this screen. Once your registration has been approved, you can log into the standard edition at any time. This enables you to gain a Lexile measure for text up to 1,000 words in length at no charge! A full Professional version of the too, without any word-count restrictions, also is available at a minimal cost. For further details, please contact us on 0845 602 1937 or send us an email.

Analysing text is straightforward once you know how. You simply need to submit a plain text file (in *.txt format) and within seconds a Lexile measure will be reported back to you. However, there are some important things to note to ensure you get an accurate Lexile measure. If you haven't done so already, we highly recommend that you read and follow the guidelines below as the accuracy of the measure depends on your adherence to these text-preparation and formatting conventions.

If you are interested in gaining a certified Lexile measure for a published book, then we suggest you check the Lexile Book Database first as it is possible the title may have been measured already. If the book cannot be found, please visit our Publishers section for more details on how to get a certified measure.

Analyse your Text Guide