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Lexical Density - What It Is and How to Measure It

Lexical density measures the proportion of content words — nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs — relative to the total words in a text. Higher density means more information per sentence, which is typical of academic and non-fiction writing. It is calculated using the Ure formula: content word count divided by total word count.

You can measure the lexical density of your own text using the Text Analyzer.

Typical lexical density by text type:

• Spoken forms typically have lexical densities below 40%
• Written forms in the English language typically have lexical densities above 40%
• Fictional literature ranged between 40% and 54% (survey by Michael Stubbs)
• Non-fictional literature ranged between 40% and 64% (survey by Michael Stubbs)
• Our survey of 100 Wikipedia articles ranged between 54% and 59%