ESV Readability (Grade Levels)
Here are the ESV’s overall readability statistics:
- Flesch Reading Ease: 74.9
- Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 7.4
That’s why we say in marketing materials that the ESV reads at an eighth-grade level.
Below are readability statistics for each book in the ESV. Readability is tough to condense to a single number; many factors contribute to how easy or hard something is to read. The Flesch-Kincaid algorithm, for example, doesn’t handle poetry well. That limitation skews the results for poetry-heavy books.
Therefore, you should best consider these figures in relative terms: John (in general) writes simpler Greek than Paul, and the ESV’s translation philosophy lets you see some of that through the lower grade level in John’s gospel and letters.
With the above cautions in mind, here are the Flesch Reading Ease (higher is easier to read) and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (lower is easier to read) for each book in the ESV. The highest and lowest numbers in each column are in bold.
| Book | Reading Ease | Grade Level |
|---|---|---|
| Genesis | 78.6 | 6.3 |
| Exodus | 76.7 | 7.3 |
| Leviticus | 71.8 | 8.7 |
| Numbers | 69.8 | 8.5 |
| Deuteronomy | 74.5 | 8.7 |
| Joshua | 66.7 | 9.4 |
| Judges | 74.5 | 7.4 |
| Ruth | 79.1 | 6.3 |
| 1 Samuel | 79.2 | 6.4 |
| 2 Samuel | 77.6 | 6.7 |
| 1 Kings | 74.1 | 7.8 |
| 2 Kings | 74.7 | 7.8 |
| 1 Chronicles | 62.2 | 8.7 |
| 2 Chronicles | 67.2 | 9.3 |
| Ezra | 63.3 | 9.8 |
| Nehemiah | 65.9 | 8.9 |
| Esther | 67.4 | 9.8 |
| Job | 86.3 | 4.2 |
| Psalms | 85.9 | 3.9 |
| Proverbs | 81.3 | 5.3 |
| Ecclesiastes | 80.6 | 6.0 |
| Song of Solomon | 83.1 | 4.9 |
| Isaiah | 81.8 | 5.5 |
| Jeremiah | 74.5 | 7.5 |
| Lamentations | 85.0 | 4.0 |
| Ezekiel | 76.5 | 7.1 |
| Daniel | 72.0 | 8.5 |
| Hosea | 85.9 | 4.9 |
| Joel | 78.9 | 5.6 |
| Amos | 83.6 | 5.3 |
| Obadiah | 80.1 | 6.1 |
| Jonah | 80.4 | 6.2 |
| Micah | 81.9 | 5.6 |
| Nahum | 85.2 | 3.8 |
| Habakkuk | 84.1 | 4.3 |
| Zephaniah | 81.5 | 5.2 |
| Haggai | 81.0 | 5.9 |
| Zechariah | 78.9 | 6.9 |
| Malachi | 79.3 | 6.3 |
| New Testament | ||
| Matthew | 77.9 | 6.6 |
| Mark | 79.3 | 6.1 |
| Luke | 78.5 | 6.5 |
| John | 82.1 | 5.6 |
| Acts | 71.5 | 8.3 |
| Romans | 74.1 | 7.1 |
| 1 Corinthians | 76.6 | 6.3 |
| 2 Corinthians | 73.3 | 7.6 |
| Galatians | 72.2 | 7.8 |
| Ephesians | 62.9 | 11.7 |
| Philippians | 68.6 | 9.0 |
| Colossians | 68.5 | 9.0 |
| 1 Thessalonians | 72.0 | 8.5 |
| 2 Thessalonians | 71.6 | 8.8 |
| 1 Timothy | 62.4 | 9.7 |
| 2 Timothy | 64.0 | 9.1 |
| Titus | 59.9 | 9.7 |
| Philemon | 73.1 | 8.8 |
| Hebrews | 66.3 | 9.5 |
| James | 76.3 | 6.4 |
| 1 Peter | 68.2 | 8.8 |
| 2 Peter | 62.7 | 10.2 |
| 1 John | 80.0 | 6.1 |
| 2 John | 77.6 | 7.2 |
| 3 John | 79.1 | 5.6 |
| Jude | 62.0 | 8.5 |
| Revelation | 74.8 | 8.4 |
We calculated these scores using Microsoft Word. We changed some of the poetry into paragraph form to improve the accuracy of the figures.
August 8th, 2005 at 1:31 pm
[...] Found an interesting post on the ESV’s site about the grade reading level of the ESV. They did something interesting, which is to break it down into reading level by book. It’d be cool to see a big comparison spreadsheet on this for multiple translations. Posted by Jamison @ 12:31 pm | [...]
August 8th, 2005 at 4:02 pm
[...] [...]
August 8th, 2005 at 4:19 pm
ESV readability levels
Grade-level 7 is an appropriate level for the ESV translation team to aim for, for the audience which it seems to be targeting. I have estimated in a previous post that the ESV reading level is probably closer to grade 10, if we properly adjust for the…
January 18th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
My previous post linked to today’s ESV Bible blog post listing Flesch-Kincaid (FK) readability levels determined by running ESV text through the grammar checker of Microsoft Word. I pointed out that the FK test is inadequate for
January 18th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
ESV Bible Blog > Blog Archive > ESV Readability (Grade Levels) Very interesting idea to break down the readabiblity of the Bible by each book.
January 18th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
I blogged corrective information in my preceding post. In this post I wish to cite reading statistics which indicate which are actually the most easy to read English Bible versions. Click here or on the title to this post to read my
January 18th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Adrian Warnock has once again proven that he is a man of character. After further help from the ESV team, he has retracted his claim that the ESV is the easiest English version to read among the versions he compared.