Flesch Portuguese Readability Calculator

Flesch Reading Ease for Portuguese: 0–100 readability score

Rudolf Flesch published his formula in 1948, and Martins et al. (1996) reworked it for Brazilian Portuguese, retuning the constants because words and syllables tend to run longer in the language. Formula: score = 248.835 − 1.015·(words/sentences) − 84.6·(syllables/words). The score runs 0–100: >75 easy (children, popular media); 50–75 medium (general adult press); <50 difficult (academic, legal, technical). Most Brazilian academic papers land around 30–50, while ENEM essays aim for the medium band. Want a higher number? Cut your sentences down (15–20 words is a good target) and reach for shorter words.

Applications

Copywriting and content marketing tend to aim for 60+ on blog posts. The score also helps when you're trimming technical manuals and product docs, prepping for the ENEM or vestibular essay, auditing government text against clear-language laws, or doing editorial passes on newspapers and magazines.

FAQ

Why a Portuguese-specific version? Words in Portuguese carry more syllables on average than in English, so plugging in the original constants makes text look harder than it is. Martins et al. recalibrated the formula against PT-BR school corpora.

Does a high score mean good writing? Not really. It just means the text is easier to read. Plenty of literary prose scores low and is still excellent. Treat Flesch as one signal among many, not a final verdict.

How do I count syllables in Portuguese? Follow the standard hyphenation rules, where each vowel or diphthong nucleus is one syllable. If you'd rather not do it by hand, tools like silabasonline.com or NLP libraries (spaCy, NLTK) handle it for you.

What about Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level? That's a separate formula that spits out US school grades. For Portuguese, you're better off with the Martins-adapted Reading Ease or a variant like Gulpease (Italian).