How readable is this text
Paste a text and out comes the Gulpease index from 0 to 100, the readability measure built for Italian: it tells you whether the text reads clearly, which education level it suits and which sentences to shorten. The text never leaves your browser.
Why Gulpease and not the English formulas
The best-known readability formulas (Flesch, Kincaid) are tuned for English and count syllables, which in Italian are counted badly and ambiguously. The Gulpease index (a University Linguistic-Pedagogical Group, 1988) is built for Italian and uses only letters, words and sentences, which are counted cleanly. It is the standard used in Italian schools and public administration to check whether a text is within reach of those who must read it.
How to read the number
It runs from 0 to 100: the higher it is, the easier the text. The official thresholds are not abstract, they say for whom the text is readable: below 80 it is hard for those with only primary schooling, below 60 for lower secondary, below 40 even for a diploma. A well-written popular text sits around 60; a contract or a law is often below 40, which is why they are a struggle to read.
The two levers: short sentences and short words
The formula says two simple things. Long sentences lower the index: splitting a period in two raises it at once. Long words lower it. Here next to the index you find the longest sentences in your text (those over 25 words), because shortening them is the fastest way to make a text readable without changing its meaning.
How things are counted (and why it matters)
Every readability measure depends on how its parts are counted, and here the definition is stated: a letter is an alphabetic character (accents included, never digits or punctuation); a word is a sequence between spaces that contains at least a letter or digit (numbers count); a sentence ends at a full stop, semicolon, colon, exclamation or question mark. These are the definitions the index was tuned with, and that is why the count here always comes out the same.
What it does not do
The index measures form, not content: a text full of short sentences and simple words can be perfectly readable and say nothing, or be wrong. It is a help to write more clearly, not a judgement on quality. If you need to count words and characters there is Word counter, to know how long it takes to read Reading time, and to clean a text of markdown and strange characters Strip markdown and invisible characters.