What is the Gulpease Index?

Gulpease is a readability formula created for the Italian language by the GULP linguistics group. Unlike English formulas that count syllables, it uses letter count per word and sentence count per word, which suits Italian's longer words better.

What is the exact formula?

The score is 89 plus the quantity 300 times the number of sentences minus 10 times the number of letters, all divided by the number of words. The result is clamped to the 0 to 100 range.

What score should I aim for?

Aim for 80 or above for the general public and official communications. Scores from 60 to 80 suit readers with a middle-school education, and below 40 the text is hard for most people.

How do I make a text easier?

Two levers raise the score: write shorter sentences, which increases the sentence count, and choose shorter words, which lowers the letter count. Both push the index upward.

Does it count punctuation as letters?

No. Only alphabetic characters are counted as letters. Spaces, digits, and punctuation are excluded from the letter total, matching how the Gulpease formula is meant to be applied.

Italian Gulpease Readability Index

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The Gulpease Index is the standard readability measure for the Italian language. It was designed for Italian’s morphology, counting letters per word rather than the syllables that English formulas rely on, and it produces a single 0-to-100 score that maps cleanly to school-education reading levels.

How it works

The index combines three counts — letters, words, and sentences:

Gulpease = 89 + (300 × sentences − 10 × letters) / words

Only alphabetic characters count toward letters. Words are whitespace-separated tokens, and a sentence ends at a full stop, exclamation mark, question mark, or ellipsis. More sentences for the same word count and fewer letters per word both raise the score. The result is clamped to the 0–100 range.

Reading the score and tips

A score of 80 or higher is comfortable for readers with only a primary-school education; 60 to 80 suits a middle-school level; 40 to 60 needs a high-school diploma; below 40 the text is difficult for most people. To raise a low score, split long sentences in two and swap long, Latinate words for shorter everyday ones. Because the formula rewards short words, technical Italian with many long compounds will naturally score lower.