Lexile Reading Measures
Search by Lexile Reading Measure Number
A Lexile measure is a piece of information about either an individual's reading ability or the difficulty of a text, like a book or magazine article. The Lexile measure is shown as a number with an "L" after it — 880L is 880 Lexile.
A book, article or piece of text gets a Lexile text measure when it's analyzed by MetaMetrics. For example, the first "Harry Potter" book measures 880L, so it's called an 880 Lexile book. A Lexile text measure is based on two strong predictors of how difficult a text is to comprehend: word frequency and sentence length. Many other factors affect the relationship between a reader and a book, including its content, the age and interests of the reader, and the design of the actual book. Lexile text measures are rounded to the nearest 10L. Text measures at or below 0L are reported as BR for Beginning Reader.
LibraryThing for Libraries offers a free Lexile tool that shows the Lexile number for a book if it is available. You can also click the number to show other titles with the same Lexile number.
Here is how the Lexiles display in CountyCat, under the More Details tab:
And here is the display once you click on the Lexile number:
You can set the start and ending range of Lexile numbers by dragging the bars from one end of the spectrum to the other. In this example, the display shows all titles with a Lexile number of ‘980L’. All links in this display go back to CountyCat and show the full display of the record.
Not all children’s titles will have this information, but those that do will show the Lexile number and some explanatory text beneath.