What is a good LIX score?

Below 30 is easy, fiction-level text. Around 30 to 40 is typical newspaper prose. 40 to 50 is factual or official writing, and above 50 is technical or academic. For general web copy in Swedish, aim for under 40.

What counts as a long word in LIX?

A long word has more than six letters, meaning seven characters or more. The share of long words is one of the two inputs to the formula, so compound-heavy Swedish text naturally scores higher.

How is LIX different from Flesch?

Flesch counts syllables, which is hard across languages. LIX was designed for Swedish and uses long-word percentage instead of syllables, making it language-independent and easy to compute reliably.

Does punctuation affect the score?

Yes. Sentence count comes from terminal punctuation like periods, question marks, and colons. Splitting one long sentence into two lowers the average sentence length and reduces the LIX value.

Is my text sent anywhere?

No. All counting and scoring runs locally in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or logged, so it is safe to paste private drafts.

Swedish LIX Readability Score

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LIX, short for Läsbarhetsindex, is a readability index created by Swedish researcher Carl-Hugo Björnsson specifically for the Swedish language. Unlike syllable-based formulas, it was designed to be easy to compute by hand and works because it relies only on word length and sentence length.

How it works

LIX uses three counts: total words, total sentences, and the number of long words. A long word is any word with more than six letters. The score combines average sentence length with the percentage of long words:

LIX = (words / sentences) + (longWords × 100 / words)

The first term is the average number of words per sentence. The second term is the share of long words expressed as a percentage. Adding them produces a single index that rises as sentences get longer and as more long words appear.

Tips and example

A children’s book with short sentences and short words lands well below 30. A government regulation packed with compound nouns like “läsbarhetsindex” and long clauses climbs above 50. To lower a LIX score, cut sentence length first, since average sentence length is added directly to the index, then replace long compounds with shorter alternatives where the meaning allows. Common Swedish reference bands are: under 30 easy, 30 to 40 medium, 40 to 50 difficult, and over 50 very difficult.