English reading difficulty
Cakes and Ale
Reading Cakes and Ale means meeting about 70,076 words of English, of which 76.9% sit in the beginner vocabulary and 88.7% are at B1 or easier. It is measured at 32/100 on this shelf, which puts it with the B2 books. At a learner's pace it is roughly 9 h of reading.
| Total words | 70,076 |
|---|---|
| Distinct words | 6,919 |
| Distinct root forms | 5,498 |
| Difficulty | 32/100 |
| Time to read | 9 h |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Suits readers at | B2 |
Vocabulary diversity
6,919 distinct words and 5,498 distinct root forms across 70,076 words of text. Longer books will almost always show more, so this is worth comparing only between books of a similar length.
Vocabulary by CEFR level
Every word of the text was looked up in a CEFR-graded vocabulary list. This is the share of the running text — not of the distinct words — that sits at each level.
| Level | Share of the text | What that level means |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | 76.9% | the first few hundred words — the ones almost every course starts with |
| A2 | 7.4% | still everyday vocabulary, but past the beginner list |
| B1 | 4.4% | the level at which most people can follow a novel |
| B2 | 1.8% | comfortable general reading |
| C1 | 0.3% | precise or literary vocabulary |
| C2 | 0.2% | rare, technical or archaic |
| Off-list | 9.0% | names, places, and words no graded list covers |
How much of it you would already know
If you know the vocabulary up to a level, this is the share of the running text you would recognise on sight:
- B1 — you would recognise 88.7% of the words.
- B2 — 90.5%.
- C1 — 90.8%.
Comprehension usually becomes comfortable somewhere around 95–98% coverage, which is why the gap between those percentages matters more than it looks: how many words you need to read a book goes through the research behind that figure.
How it reads
| Average sentence | 16.6 words |
|---|---|
| Sentence length, 99th percentile | 64 words |
| Average word | 4.13 letters |
| Dialogue | 40.1% of the text |
Where it gets harder
The book was split into ten equal spans and each measured on its own. Reading left to right, the scores are 32, 32, 32, 31, 34, 36, 34, 31, 32, 31. The hardest span is the sixth and the easiest is the fourth, so a sample from the opening is not always a fair test of the whole book.
The words it leans on
Words that recur in this book and sit above the everyday vocabulary. These are the ones worth tapping the first time they appear:
- B2 — grand, neat, modest, sincere, neither, genius, master, ease
- C1 — notwithstanding, tact, flatter, obscure, immense, elaborate, agreeable, resent
- C2 — curate, trifle, merit, eminent, posterity, ingenuous, malicious, patronizing
Where to get it, free and legally
This book is in the public domain. Download it as an EPUB from Standard Ebooks, then open it in ClickBook.
Reading it without stopping every line
At 9.5% uncommon words, a book this size will still hand you words you do not know — that is what makes it worth reading. What slows people down is not meeting the word, it is leaving the page to look it up. ClickBook explains the word where it stands, using the sentence around it, and you keep reading.