How Reading Time Is Calculated (and Why 238 Words per Minute)

Reading time is simply the number of words divided by a reading speed. The speed most worth using for adults reading English non-fiction silently is 238 words per minute, the average found by a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies. So a 1,000-word article takes about four minutes. Fiction reads a little faster, at about 260 words per minute, while reading aloud or giving a talk is much slower, around 130 to 180.

Below is where those figures come from, a conversion table for common lengths, and the reasons a real reader might take half or twice as long as the estimate.

Where 238 words per minute comes from

For decades, popular articles and speed-reading courses repeated that adults read 250 to 300 words per minute, or more. Marc Brysbaert of Ghent University set out to check that figure. His paper, "How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate" (Brysbaert, 2019, Journal of Memory and Language, volume 109), pooled 190 studies with 18,573 participants.

The results were lower than the folklore:

The paper explains the fiction advantage by word length: novels use shorter, more familiar words than articles and reports, and readers move through short words faster. The paper also reviews how the older, higher figures came to be repeated so widely. Rates were lower for children, older adults and people reading in a second language.

Speaking is slower again. Presentations and speeches are usually planned at 130 to 150 words per minute, which leaves time for pauses and emphasis, and audiences follow comfortably at that pace.

Word count to time

Minutes are rounded to the nearest whole minute; long texts are shown in hours and minutes.

The 80,000-word row is a typical adult novel: about five and a half hours of silent reading, but about nine and a half hours read aloud at 140 words per minute.

Why the estimate and the reality differ

Difficulty and familiarity

Dense technical prose with unfamiliar terms can halve anyone's speed, while an easy story on a familiar topic lets the same reader go faster than average. A single number cannot know which kind of reader will arrive, so it is best read as "for an average adult on average text".

Word length

Brysbaert's analysis found that the gap between fiction and non-fiction can be predicted from the length of the words used. A text full of long words takes longer per word. Some estimators therefore divide the number of characters by a characters-per-minute rate instead; for English the two approaches give similar answers on ordinary prose.

Purpose

Reading to learn or to check details is slower than reading for gist. Proofreading is much slower still, because the reader deliberately looks at every word. Skimming is faster but takes in far less.

Tables, code and images

Word-based estimates ignore time spent looking at figures, studying a table or following a code sample. A heavily illustrated tutorial often takes longer than its word count suggests. Some estimators add a fixed allowance for each image; there is no standard for this, so if you do it, say so.

Language and age

Second-language readers, children and older adults are slower on average, and different languages need different numbers of words to say the same thing. An English rate applied to a translation will be off.

Showing a reading time on your own writing

• Count only the body text. Navigation, footers, comments and code listings inflate the estimate if they are counted.
• Round honestly. Rounding to the nearest minute is fine; showing "0 min" for short notes is not, so show "under a minute" or "1 min" instead.
• Use one rate across the site so estimates are comparable between pages.
• Pick the rate for the medium. A script for a talk should be timed at speaking pace, not at a silent reading rate.

A worked example: from report to talk

Say you have written a 1,850-word report and have been asked to present it in a 10-minute slot. As a document, it takes an average reader about 8 min to read silently. Spoken at a steady 140 words per minute, the same text runs to about 13 min, well over the slot, before you allow any time for slides or questions.

Work backwards from the time instead. Ten minutes at 140 words per minute is 1,400 words, and leaving a minute spare brings it to about 1,260. So the talk version needs roughly a third of the report cut, which usually means keeping the findings and recommendations and dropping the method details that readers can look up afterwards.

Nerves tend to speed people up, and slides with detailed charts slow them down, so rehearse with a timer once the draft is close.

Can you read faster?

Readers can go faster by skimming, but comprehension falls. Reviews of speed-reading research, including the one by Rayner and colleagues in Psychological Science in the Public Interest (2016), found no evidence that techniques promising several times normal speed deliver full understanding at those speeds. What does help is familiarity: the more you read in a field, the more of its vocabulary you recognise instantly, and the closer you get to the top of the normal range.

For the lengths that different kinds of writing usually run to, see our guide on how many words essays, articles and descriptions tend to be.