1. Black Beauty
About 3.1 new words in every 100
The life of a horse in Victorian England, told by the horse.
Free classics
For English learners
The easiest classics to read in English
The free classics, ranked by how many of their words fall outside the 4,000 most common English word families: the words WordySpot underlines for a new reader. Fewer means an easier read. All of them are free to read here, with every underlined word explained.
2. Emma
About 3.1 new words in every 100
A clever young woman plays matchmaker for everyone and misreads every heart, her own included.
3. Herland
About 3.2 new words in every 100
Three American explorers find a hidden country where only women live.
4. The Moonstone
About 3.2 new words in every 100
A stolen diamond, told by several narrators. An early detective novel.
5. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
About 3.3 new words in every 100
Dorothy follows the yellow brick road. Simple, clear prose.
6. Persuasion
About 3.4 new words in every 100
Years after she was talked out of an engagement, Anne meets the man again.
7. Sense and Sensibility
About 3.4 new words in every 100
Two sisters, one careful and one passionate, look for love with little money.
8. The Railway Children
About 3.6 new words in every 100
Three children move to the country and wave at the trains while they wait for their father.
10. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
About 3.9 new words in every 100
A raft journey down the Mississippi. Written in strong dialect.
11. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
About 4.0 new words in every 100
More short Holmes cases, ending at the Reichenbach Falls.
12. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
About 4.1 new words in every 100
A girl falls down a rabbit hole into a world of wordplay.
13. Pride and Prejudice
About 4.1 new words in every 100
Elizabeth Bennet, Mr. Darcy, and first impressions.
14. The Importance of Being Earnest
About 4.1 new words in every 100
A comic play about double lives. Short, all dialogue.
15. A Little Princess
About 4.2 new words in every 100
A rich girl at a London school loses everything and stays kind.
16. Through the Looking-Glass
About 4.2 new words in every 100
Alice climbs through a mirror into a land laid out like a chessboard.
17. Five Children and It
About 4.3 new words in every 100
Children find a grumpy sand-fairy who grants one wish a day, and every wish goes wrong.
18. The Valley of Fear
About 4.3 new words in every 100
A murder in a moated manor house leads Holmes to a secret society in America.
19. Great Expectations
About 4.4 new words in every 100
A poor boy is given money by a secret benefactor and learns what a gentleman really is.
20. Kidnapped
About 4.4 new words in every 100
Cheated of his inheritance and sold onto a ship, a young man escapes across the Scottish Highlands.
21. Three Men in a Boat
About 4.4 new words in every 100
Three friends and a dog take a boat up the Thames. Very funny.
22. My Ántonia
About 4.5 new words in every 100
Growing up on the Nebraska prairie beside a girl from a Bohemian immigrant family.
23. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
About 4.5 new words in every 100
A memoir of slavery and escape. Short and powerful.
24. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
About 4.5 new words in every 100
A printer’s path to science and politics, told plainly.
25. The Prisoner of Zenda
About 4.5 new words in every 100
An Englishman who looks exactly like a king must take his place.
27. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
About 4.6 new words in every 100
Twelve short cases. Read one story at a time.
28. The Return of Sherlock Holmes
About 4.6 new words in every 100
Holmes is back, and thirteen new cases start with the empty house.
29. The Secret Garden
About 4.6 new words in every 100
A lonely girl finds a locked garden and brings it back to life.
30. Greenmantle
About 4.7 new words in every 100
Richard Hannay crosses wartime Europe to stop a plot in the East.
31. King Solomon’s Mines
About 4.7 new words in every 100
A hunt for a legendary diamond mine in southern Africa.
32. The Hound of the Baskervilles
About 4.7 new words in every 100
Holmes and a deadly legend on the moors.
33. The Sign of the Four
About 4.7 new words in every 100
A stolen treasure, a pact between four men and a night chase down the Thames.
34. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
About 4.8 new words in every 100
A respected doctor and his monstrous other self. A short, tense read.
36. The Great Gatsby
About 4.9 new words in every 100
Parties, money and longing on Long Island in the 1920s.
37. The Thirty-Nine Steps
About 4.9 new words in every 100
A man on the run across Scotland with a spy plot in his pocket.
38. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
About 5.0 new words in every 100
An American engineer wakes up in King Arthur’s England and sets about modernizing it.
39. The Man Who Was Thursday
About 5.0 new words in every 100
A poet turned detective joins a council of anarchists, each named for a day of the week.
40. The Picture of Dorian Gray
About 5.0 new words in every 100
A portrait ages so a beautiful young man does not.
42. Peter and Wendy
About 5.1 new words in every 100
Peter Pan takes Wendy and her brothers to Neverland, where children never grow up.
43. She
About 5.1 new words in every 100
Explorers find a lost African city ruled by an immortal queen.
44. A Study in Scarlet
About 5.2 new words in every 100
Sherlock Holmes’s first case: a body, a word written in blood, and Watson just back from war.
45. Anne of Avonlea
About 5.2 new words in every 100
Anne, now sixteen, becomes the village schoolteacher.
46. Ethan Frome
About 5.2 new words in every 100
A short, wintry story of a farmer caught between duty and love.
47. Short Fiction by Anton Chekhov
About 5.2 new words in every 100
Quiet, sharp stories about everyday Russian life.
48. The Age of Innocence
About 5.2 new words in every 100
Duty against desire in 1870s New York society.
49. The Innocence of Father Brown
About 5.2 new words in every 100
A quiet priest solves crimes by understanding people.
50. A Princess of Mars
About 5.3 new words in every 100
A Civil War veteran wakes up on Mars and fights for its princess.
51. Just So Stories
About 5.3 new words in every 100
How the leopard got its spots, how the camel got its hump, and other tales to read aloud.
52. The Time Machine
About 5.3 new words in every 100
An inventor travels to the far future and finds humanity split in two.
53. Anne of Green Gables
About 5.5 new words in every 100
A talkative orphan changes a quiet farm on Prince Edward Island.
54. Around the World in Eighty Days
About 5.5 new words in every 100
A precise English gentleman bets his fortune on a race around the globe.
55. The Awakening
About 5.5 new words in every 100
A woman in New Orleans questions the life expected of her.
56. The Jungle Book
About 5.5 new words in every 100
Mowgli, raised by wolves, and other animal stories.
57. The Lost World
About 5.5 new words in every 100
An expedition finds a South American plateau where dinosaurs still live.
58. The Marvelous Land of Oz
About 5.5 new words in every 100
A boy named Tip runs away from a witch to the Emerald City.
59. Essays
About 5.7 new words in every 100
Self-reliance, friendship, nature. Short essays to read one at a time.
60. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
About 5.7 new words in every 100
Boyhood mischief and adventure on the Mississippi.
61. The Count of Monte Cristo
About 5.7 new words in every 100
Betrayal, prison, escape and a long revenge. A very long book.
62. The First Men in the Moon
About 5.9 new words in every 100
Two men fly to the Moon and find a world living under its surface.
64. Heart of Darkness
About 6.1 new words in every 100
A journey up the Congo River. Short but dense.
65. Little Women
About 6.1 new words in every 100
Four sisters grow up during and after the American Civil War.
66. The Invisible Man
About 6.1 new words in every 100
A scientist makes himself invisible and cannot undo it.
67. The Sea-Wolf
About 6.1 new words in every 100
A gentleman pulled from the sea is made to work for a brutal, brilliant captain.
68. Oliver Twist
About 6.2 new words in every 100
An orphan escapes the workhouse and falls in with a gang of London thieves.
69. Short Fiction by Saki
About 6.3 new words in every 100
Sharp, funny stories of Edwardian society, many with a twist.
70. Jane Eyre
About 6.4 new words in every 100
An orphan becomes a governess and keeps her independence.
71. The Island of Doctor Moreau
About 6.4 new words in every 100
A shipwrecked man reaches an island where a doctor turns animals into something like people.
72. A Christmas Carol
About 6.5 new words in every 100
A miser meets three ghosts on Christmas Eve. Short and warm.
73. Short Fiction by O. Henry
About 6.5 new words in every 100
Short stories of ordinary New Yorkers, with twist endings.
74. Tarzan of the Apes
About 6.5 new words in every 100
A boy raised by apes in the jungle grows up to meet his own kind.
75. Kim
About 6.6 new words in every 100
An orphan roams India with a Tibetan lama and learns to be a spy.
76. The Call of the Wild
About 6.6 new words in every 100
A stolen dog learns to survive in the Yukon gold rush.
78. Wuthering Heights
About 6.6 new words in every 100
A wild, destructive love on the Yorkshire moors.
79. Frankenstein
About 6.7 new words in every 100
A scientist creates life and runs from what he made.
80. The Scarlet Pimpernel
About 6.7 new words in every 100
An English gentleman secretly rescues French nobles from the guillotine.
82. The Wind in the Willows
About 6.8 new words in every 100
Mole, Rat, Badger and reckless Mr. Toad along an English river.
83. The Red Badge of Courage
About 7.1 new words in every 100
A young soldier’s first battle in the American Civil War, from the inside.
84. Short Fiction by Edgar Allan Poe
About 7.3 new words in every 100
Dark, strange tales, including the first detective stories.
85. The Prince and the Pauper
About 7.5 new words in every 100
A poor London boy and a young prince of Tudor England swap places.
86. The Scarlet Letter
About 7.7 new words in every 100
In Puritan Boston, a woman must wear a scarlet A and keeps her lover’s name secret.
87. Moby-Dick
About 8.4 new words in every 100
Captain Ahab hunts the white whale that took his leg. Long, and full of the sea.
A book with few new words can still be hard going: long sentences, old spellings and dialect count too. Treat the ranking as a starting point and open the first chapter to see.
About these books
These books are in the public domain: their authors, and any translators, died more than 70 years ago, and they were first published before 1931. That keeps them free to read in the US, the UK and the EU.
The texts come from Standard Ebooks, a volunteer project that carefully produces free, public-domain ebooks and releases its own work under the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Their editions build on transcriptions from Project Gutenberg and other volunteers. Each book page links to its page at Standard Ebooks.
The underlined words are the ones a new WordySpot account would see: words outside the most common English word families. With a free account you set your own level, and the words you mark as known stop being underlined.