Reading Time Calculator
How long a piece takes to read silently, to read out loud, and to deliver as a talk — at rates measured across 190 studies rather than rounded to something memorable. Run the sum backwards and it tells you how many words fill the slot you are writing for.
How much there is to read
Paste the draft and the words are counted for you, or type the figure your editor already gave you.
Not sure? The word counter counts a passage and publishes the rules it used, which is worth knowing when the figure is contractual.
238 words a minute is the pooled average from Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies. Only the silent rate changes here; reading aloud and speaking have their own fixed rates.
The talk or reading you are writing for. This runs the sum backwards and says how many words fill it.
500 words at 238 words per minute. Read out loud it runs 2 min 44 sec, and delivered as a talk it fills anywhere from 3 min 20 sec at a brisk 150 words a minute to 5 min 0 sec at a deliberate 100.
- Silent reading (238 wpm)
- 2 min 6 sec
- Reading aloud (183 wpm)
- 2 min 44 sec
- Talk, brisk (150 wpm)
- 3 min 20 sec
- Talk, typical (125 wpm)
- 4 min 0 sec
- Talk, deliberate (100 wpm)
- 5 min 0 sec
- Words counted
- 500
- Words for a 5-minute slot
- 500–750
| Slot | Deliberate (100 wpm) | Typical (125 wpm) | Brisk (150 wpm) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 min | 100 | 125 | 150 |
| 3 min | 300 | 375 | 450 |
| 5 min — yours | 500 | 625 | 750 |
| 10 min | 1,000 | 1,250 | 1,500 |
| 18 min | 1,800 | 2,250 | 2,700 |
| 30 min | 3,000 | 3,750 | 4,500 |
| 45 min | 4,500 | 5,625 | 6,750 |
Four rates, one division, and where each rate comes from
The arithmetic is words divided by a rate. Everything that makes an estimate good or useless is in the rate you divide by, so this page names all of them.
t = W ÷ r • W = r × t • r ∈ {238 silent, 183 aloud, 100–150 spoken}- 238 wpm
- Silent reading of non-fiction by adults — the pooled mean from Brysbaert (2019), and adjustable above
- 183 wpm
- Reading the same text out loud, from the same meta-analysis, which is why the two figures are comparable
- 100–150 wpm
- Prepared delivery: the low end for technical or interpreted material, the high end for a conversational talk
- W = r × t
- The same relation run backwards — how many words fill a slot of a given length
Silent reading is the only rate you can change, because it is the only one that legitimately varies by reader and by material. Reading aloud and speaking are governed by the mouth rather than the eye, and the band they occupy is narrow enough that adjusting it would be false precision.
A 1,200-word post, four ways
Silently at 238 words a minute: 1,200 ÷ 238 = 5.04 minutes, or 5 minutes 3 seconds. Read out loud at 183: 1,200 ÷ 183 = 6.56 minutes, 6 minutes 33 seconds — a third longer, which is the number that matters if you are recording it. Delivered as a talk it stretches again, to 8 minutes at a brisk 150 words a minute and 12 minutes at a deliberate 100.
That spread is the useful part. The same 1,200 words are a five-minute read, a seven-minute listen and a ten-minute talk, and a writer who sizes a conference slot against the reading figure overruns by half. Run backwards for an 18-minute slot — the TED limit — the answer is 1,800 words at 100 wpm, 2,250 at 125 and 2,700 at 150. Write 2,250 and you can afford to pause.
Why there is no 1,000-words-a-minute preset
Rayner and colleagues reviewed the evidence in 2016 and reached a conclusion that has not been seriously challenged: the ceiling on reading speed is set by eye movements and by the speed at which language is understood, and no training regime moves either very far. Somewhere around 500 words a minute a reader stops fixating on most of the words on the page and starts sampling it, and comprehension falls away with the fixations — not gently, and not only on difficult material.
Skimming is genuinely useful. It is how anyone gets through a long report, and knowing what to skip is a skill worth having. But it is not reading, and a plan built on 1,000 words a minute is a plan to have read something rather than to have understood it. The preset here tops out at 500 and is labelled for what happens there. The custom box goes higher so you can type a speed-reading course’s claim in and see what it implies: seven minutes for a book chapter, and no time at all to think about it.
What this calculator assumes
- The rates are English-language adult averages. Reading rates in words per minute are not comparable across languages, because words carry different amounts of meaning in each.
- 238 words a minute is a mean with a wide interval around it. Individual readers on non-fiction range roughly from 175 to 300, so treat any single figure as a planning estimate rather than a promise.
- Only prose is modelled. Images, tables, equations and code blocks all cost far more time than their word counts suggest, and none of them are accounted for here.
- Speaking times assume prepared delivery at a steady rate. They do not include pauses for laughter, questions, demos, or the thirty seconds it takes to find the right slide.
- Words pasted in are counted with the rules published on the word counter: whitespace separates, hyphenated compounds and contractions stay whole, and an em dash splits.
- Times are rounded to the second and word targets to the whole word. Neither the meta-analysis nor your delivery is that precise.
Reading time FAQ
How many words is a 5-minute talk?
Between 500 and 750, depending on how fast you speak. Prepared delivery runs from about 100 words a minute for material that has to be absorbed as it is said — anything technical, anything with numbers in it, anything being interpreted or captioned — up to about 150 for a conversational talk on familiar ground. The usual advice of 600 to 750 words assumes the upper half of that band. Draft to 625, the midpoint, and you have room to slow down for the part that matters.
Where does 238 words per minute come from?
Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis in the Journal of Memory and Language, which pooled 190 studies covering roughly 18,000 participants and put silent reading of non-fiction by adults at 238 words per minute, and reading the same text aloud at 183. Fiction runs faster, at around 260. The figures are not round because nobody rounded them: the 200 and 250 that publishing tools quote are round precisely because they were never measured.
Can I really learn to read 1,000 words a minute?
No, and the evidence on this is unusually clear. Rayner and colleagues reviewed it in 2016 and found that the limits on reading speed are set by eye movements and by how fast language is processed, neither of which has a training loophole. Past about 500 words a minute the eye stops fixating on most words and starts sampling the page — which is skimming, a real and useful skill, but not reading. Comprehension falls with it. Every advertised rate above roughly 500 wpm is describing a skim, and the test that would show it usually is not administered.
Why do two blogs give the same article different reading times?
Because they assume different rates. Medium quotes 265 words per minute, most WordPress plugins default to 200, and some use 180 to be generous. The same 1,200-word article is therefore a 4.5-minute read, a 6-minute read or a 6.7-minute read depending on nothing but the plugin. None of them are wrong so much as unstated, which is why the rate is adjustable here and printed alongside the answer.
Does this account for images, tables and code?
No. It counts words and multiplies. A chart a reader actually studies can cost thirty seconds that no word count predicts, a code block gets read at a fraction of prose speed or skipped entirely, and a table stops most readers dead. For an article that is mostly prose the estimate is good; for documentation or a technical post, treat it as a floor.
Sources and review notes
- Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047 — the source of the 238 wpm silent and 183 wpm aloud figures
- Rayner, K., Schotter, E. R., Masson, M. E. J., Potter, M. C., & Treiman, R. (2016). So Much to Read, So Little Time: How Do We Read, and Can Speed Reading Help? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(1), 4–34 — the review behind the speed-reading caveat
The speaking band of 100 to 150 words a minute is a convention from broadcast and presentation practice rather than a single published study, and is reported here as a band for that reason. The silent and aloud rates are the meta-analytic means above, and the arithmetic between them is one division.