Reading Time Calculator

How to use the Reading Time Calculator

1. 1Paste or type your text. Reading and speaking times update instantly.
2. 2Choose a reading speed — 238 words per minute is the adult average for non-fiction — and a speaking speed, or select Custom to enter your own.
3. 3Use the speaking time to plan a talk or video and the reading time for a blog post’s “x min read” label.

What is the Reading Time Calculator?

Reading time is simply the number of words divided by a reading speed. A 2018 meta-analysis of 190 studies (Brysbaert, 2019) found that adults read English non-fiction silently at about 238 words per minute and fiction at about 260; speaking is slower, around 140–160 words per minute for a presentation. So a 1,200-word article takes about five minutes to read and eight minutes to deliver as a talk.

Real speed varies with the reader and the text: technical writing is slower, familiar topics faster, and reading on a phone a little slower than on paper. For languages written without spaces, such as Chinese and Japanese, each character is counted as one word, which is how reading-speed studies measure them — choose a custom speed for those, since typical rates are given in characters per minute.