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How hard is Le Horla to read?
The Horla
By Guy de Maupassant · In French
- Words for 95% of the text
- 8,474
- Sentence length
- 14.0 words
- Words beyond the 5,000 most common
- 77 per 1,000
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Le Horla is an intermediate read in French. Maupassant's sentences are of moderate length and a little under a quarter of the text is dialogue, but the vocabulary is wide: a reader needs a large stock of words to follow it comfortably, and nineteenth-century turns of phrase such as old-fashioned adverbs and the literary past subjunctive appear along the way. It suits a reader who is comfortable with French prose and wants a classic of the fantastic, told as a narrator's growing unease.
MnemoRead measured this book from its full text: how many of the language's most common words you need to follow it, and how long its sentences are.
How hard this book is
Easier than 83% of our French books
The score rises with the words needed to cover 95% of the text and with sentence length. It is the same in every language. Books within about ten points of each other read about as hard.
- Words for 95% of the text
- 8,474
- Sentence length
- 14.0 words
- One sentence in ten runs past 31 words
- Length
- Novella
- 44,271 words · ~3-8 hours
- Words beyond the 5,000 most common
- 77 per 1,000
- Dialogue
- 23%
Vocabulary needed
Share of the text covered by the most common words of the language.
Names of people and places count as known words.
Show the numbers
| Most common words | Share of the text |
|---|---|
| 100 | 61.6% |
| 250 | 69.1% |
| 500 | 74.5% |
| 1,000 | 80.0% |
| 2,000 | 85.6% |
| 3,000 | 88.5% |
| 5,000 | 92.3% |
| 7,500 | 94.4% |
| 10,000 | 95.8% |
| 15,000 | 97.3% |
| 20,000 | 98.1% |
| 30,000 | 98.9% |
CEFR word lists
Share of the text each level's words cover, with the levels below it. The book's vocabulary is rated at the first level to reach 95%.
Words to learn first
The words this book uses most that are not among the 5,000 most common of the language, with how often each appears.
- murmurer×17
- auberge×15
- tantôt×15
- songer×13
- brusquement×12
- maigre×12
- remuer×12
- effrayant×11
- fût×11
- glacé×11
- mé×11
- quelquefois×11
- éperdu×11
- baronne×10
- charpentier×10
- cheminée×10
- clochette×10
- furieux×10
- griser×10
- immobile×10
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