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The Oxford Text Checker

The Oxford Text Checker

Assess the difficulty of any text with the Oxford Text Checker

The Oxford Text Checker will check the vocabulary in any text against one of three wordlists. You can find out which words in a text are part of:

  • the Oxford 3000™ - our list of the most useful and important words to learn in English (which we call "keywords")
  • the top 2,000 keywords taken from the Oxford 3000™ (the keyword list from our Oxford Basic American Dictionary)
  • the Academic Word List - a list of words that you are likely to meet if you study at an English-speaking university

To use the Text Checker, first choose which wordlist you want to check against. Next, type or paste your text into the box, then click "Check Text." When checking against the Oxford wordlists, then the words which are not part of the selected wordlist will be highlighted in red. For the Academic Word List, any words that are on the list will be highlighted in red. The Text Checker will also tell you what percentage of the words in the text are/are not part of the wordlist. You can use this information to judge the difficulty of a text. When checking against the Oxford keywords lists, the more words highlighted in red, the more difficult the text.

  • In a typical low intermediate text, close to 100% of the words will be Oxford 3000 keywords.
  • In a typical high intermediate text, 90-95% of the words will be Oxford 3000 keywords.
  • In a typical advanced text, 75-90% of the words will be Oxford 3000 keywords.

The Text Checker will automatically ignore any numbers (in the form "25" or "twenty-five") and symbols. If there are any proper names in your text, such as Oxford or Smith, you can enter them in the "ignore" box. This will make sure that the Text Checker does not mistake them for difficult words and highlight them in red.

Choose which wordlist you want to check against:



Enter the text to check:

Enter any words to be ignored in this box: