See how long your text takes to read

Reading speed is the number of words a person takes in per minute. It is written as wpm, short for words per minute.

The same person has several speeds, depending on what they do with the text. Silent reading is the fastest, because it skips the work of speaking. Reading aloud is slower, because every word has to be pronounced. Speed also depends on age, on whether the text is in the reader's first language, and on how difficult the text is.

One more thing matters for this calculator. A speed in words per minute differs between languages, because languages differ in word length and in how many words they need for the same content. Each language version of the calculator therefore uses speeds set for its own language.

Reading time is the word count divided by the reading speed. A 1,000-word text read silently at 236 words per minute takes 5 minutes. Read aloud at 190 words per minute, the same text takes 6 minutes.

The calculator above does this for you. Paste your text into the Paste or type text field, and the tool counts the words and shows the number under the field. When you already know the length, switch with the Enter word count button and type just the number.

You choose the pace with one of three buttons: Silent reading, Reading aloud or Custom pace. Next to the first two, the panel shows the words per minute it is using, so you can see where the result comes from. The result is rounded up to whole minutes, and from one hour upwards it appears in hours and minutes.

Both speeds come from Marc Brysbaert's meta-analysis of reading rate, which brought together 190 studies with 18,573 participants[1]. For English it lists 236 words per minute for silent reading, based on 144 studies. Reading aloud comes to 190 words per minute, based on 27 studies. These are the two values in the calculator.

The abstract of the same paper gives two other figures: 238 words per minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. Fiction reads faster because its words are shorter on average. The value of 236 comes from the table the paper uses to compare languages, and the German, French, Spanish and Italian versions of this calculator take their speeds from the same table.

Reading aloud also has a measured norm from the IReST study. It tested 25 English readers aged 18 to 35, each reading ten short texts written at sixth-grade level, and recorded 228 words per minute[2]. The calculator keeps 190, the average across 27 English studies with 3,482 participants.

The Custom pace field is useful when you know your own speed or when you prepare a recording or a talk. For speech, a common reference is the scale published by Tauroza and Allison in their study of speech rates in British English[3].

On that scale, speech below 100 words per minute sounds slower than normal, and 100 to 125 is moderately slow. The range from 125 to 160 is average, and 160 to 185 is moderately fast. Above 185 words per minute, listeners hear speech as faster than normal.

The reading-aloud speed of 190 words per minute sits just above that last threshold. It describes continuous reading of a text, so for a talk with pauses a custom pace from the average range fits better. Brysbaert also cites a study that considered 120 words per minute an acceptable pace for reading aloud over an eight-hour day[1], which is a useful figure for long narration. Count the words of your script in the word and character counter and read the time from the field above.

Medium calculates the read time of every story at roughly 265 words per minute, with an adjustment for images[4]. Only Chinese, Japanese and Korean are handled differently, at 500 characters per minute.

That pace is about 12 percent faster than the 236 words per minute in this calculator. A 2,000-word article takes 9 minutes here, and at Medium's pace it comes to about seven and a half. When you want to show readers a time based on the research average, calculate it here.

For silent reading of English non-fiction, most adults fall between 175 and 300 words per minute. For fiction the range is 200 to 320[1]. Brysbaert also cites a 2016 review by Rayner and colleagues, which explains why reading faster than 1,000 words per minute is impossible without a severe loss of understanding.

The meta-analysis also tested Carver's theory of five reading “gears”, from memorising a text at 138 words per minute to scanning at 650. It found no separate gears for learning for a multiple-choice test and for ordinary reading, which Carver set at 200 and 300. Once word length is taken into account, both kinds of reading came out at a similar pace between those two numbers. Only scanning clearly differs from reading, because the reader no longer tries to understand the text and only looks for a word in it[1].

Memorising a text does take longer. Brysbaert puts it at about 100 words per minute, and several studies found even less, but he attributes the slowdown to the reader organising the information and going back over the text, not to a different way of reading[1]. You can enter that pace, or any other, in the Custom pace field, and the calculator works out the time for it.

The research figures describe adults reading easy prose in their first language. Brysbaert names three groups who read more slowly: children, older adults and people reading in a second language[1]. When your audience reads English as a second language, a lower custom pace gives a more realistic time.

The text itself matters too. A manual full of technical terms reads more slowly than a novel, because longer words and longer sentences take more work. To check the length and the average sentence length of a text before you publish it, use the word and character counter. The Flesch Reading Ease score rates the same text from 0 to 100, from very difficult to very easy, and the Gunning fog index answers the same question in years of schooling.

When you design a page before the final copy exists, create placeholder text with the number of words you plan in the Lorem Ipsum generator and check here what reading time such an article gets.