Lexical Density Calculator

About this calculator

Lexical density is the percentage of content words — nouns, main verbs, adjectives and adverbs, which carry the core meaning of a sentence — relative to the total word count, as opposed to function words like articles, pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions, which mainly serve grammatical structure. It's calculated as (content words / total words) × 100, following the widely used formula developed by linguist Jean Ure.

Linguists use lexical density to compare how information-dense written versus spoken language tends to be (written text typically scores higher), while ESL/EFL teachers and readability analysts use it to judge how demanding a passage is for a learner, since a high proportion of content words generally means more new vocabulary to process per sentence.