Reading Time Calculator

How to use the reading time calculator

1. Paste your text into the box, type it, or use Open file for a plain-text file. The result updates as you type.
2. Read Reading time (silent reading) and Speaking time (reading aloud), with the word count used for both.
3. Change Your reading speed (wpm) if you know you read faster or slower than average, or if the text is fiction.
4. Change Speaking speed (wpm) to match how fast you or your presenter talk.
5. Check the At other speeds table to see the same text at five typical speeds, from slow speech to skimming.

The settings and the comparison table

Both settings are remembered on this device for the next visit. A speed outside the range is brought into it (5 wpm is used as 50, 99,999 as 1,500), and an empty, zero or negative box uses the default (238 or 183). Whenever the calculator uses a different number from the one typed, a note under the result says which speeds it used.

The At other speeds table always uses the same five speeds, whatever you enter above:

The three middle figures are the averages from Brysbaert’s 2019 review. The 130 and 450 rows, labelled rough guide in the tool, are reference points for a slow, pausing speaker and for skimming, not research averages.

How the time is calculated

The calculator counts words with the same rules as the word counter, divides by the speed and rounds to the nearest second:

time in seconds = words ÷ words per minute × 60

A word is any run of characters between spaces, tabs or line breaks that contains at least one letter or digit. So well-known, don’t, 3.5 and a URL each count once, while a lone dash, a bullet symbol or an emoji on its own does not count. Chinese, Japanese and Thai characters count one each. For example, Read the report (pp. 4–7) by 5 p.m. — thanks! 🙂 is 9 words: the dash and the emoji are skipped.

How the result is shown:

• Under a minute: seconds only, never less than 1 second for any text with a word in it (1 word at 238 wpm shows 1 sec).
• Under an hour: minutes and seconds, such as 4 min 12 sec, or just 4 min when the seconds are zero.
• An hour or more: hours and minutes, rounded to the nearest minute, such as 5 h 36 min; a whole number of hours shows as just 7 h. For example, 10,000 words at 130 wpm is 76 min 55 sec, shown as 1 h 17 min.

Markup counts like any other text. If you paste HTML or Markdown, words inside tags such as <p>Hello are counted, while a lone # or - is not. For an exact figure, strip the tags first with remove HTML tags.

The estimate covers words only. It does not add time for images, tables, code samples or re-reading, and Brysbaert found that texts with longer words are read more slowly, so technical writing may take longer than the estimate.

Reading times for common lengths

All figures below come from the calculator’s own function:

The sample text in the tool is 33 words: 8 seconds read silently and 11 seconds read aloud.

Choosing the right speed

Brysbaert’s review of 190 studies with 18,573 participants found that most adults read non-fiction silently at 175 to 300 words per minute and fiction at 200 to 320, so the averages are a middle point, not a rule. Pick the speed that fits the reader:

• Blog posts, reports and documentation: 238 wpm, the default.
• Novels and short stories: 260 wpm, or your own measured speed.
• A script you will read out: 183 wpm for speaking time. Speakers who pause for slides or questions are slower; plan with the words to minutes converter, which also works the other way, from minutes to words.
• Readers in a second language or younger readers: a lower figure than the average.

To measure your own speed, read an unfamiliar passage for one minute, then count the words you got through. A few tries with different texts give a steadier number.

Pages per hour and book length

Pages differ so much between books that the calculator works in words. To turn a speed into pages per hour, count the words on one full page with the word counter, then work out words per minute × 60 ÷ words per page. At 238 wpm and 300 words per page that is about 48 pages an hour; at 260 wpm it is 52.

For manuscripts and essays in a standard font, the words to pages converter estimates the page count from the word count.

When people use it

• Bloggers and editors adding a “5 min read” label to an article. Paste the final draft, not the outline, so headings and captions are counted too.
• Speakers and students checking that a speech or presentation script fits its time slot, using the speaking time.
• Podcast, video and voice-over writers estimating how long a narration will run before recording.
• Teachers judging whether a reading assignment fits a lesson.
• Email and newsletter writers keeping a message short enough to read in a minute or two. If the text is hard going, the readability checker shows which sentences to simplify.

Questions