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Articles, documentation, reports — the default for web copy.
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The rates come from Marc Brysbaert’s 2019 review in the Journal of Memory and Language, which pooled 190 studies of adult English readers: 238 words per minute reading non-fiction silently, 260 for fiction, and 183 reading aloud. The slow and fast figures are the ranges that review reports (175–300 for non-fiction, 200–320 for fiction), not a margin invented around the average — which is why they disappear when you set your own rate.
A word count is a poor model of a hard text. Dense technical material, anything with code samples, formulae or tables, and anything being read to be acted on rather than skimmed, all take considerably longer than this. Treat the number as a floor.
Paste a piece of writing, say how it is going to be read, and this estimator returns the time it should take, a slow-to-fast range where one applies, and the rounded badge a site would print above the article. It also reports words, sentences and characters, because the estimate is derived from the word count.
A 1,200-word article read silently as non-fiction, at the mean rate of 238 words per minute, comes to 5 min 3 sec — which a site would print as a “6 min read”. A slow reader at 175 wpm needs 6 min 51 sec for the same piece, and a quick one at 300 wpm is through it in 4 min. The spread is the honest part of the answer: one article is a four-minute read or a seven-minute read depending entirely on who opened it.
Read aloud at 183 wpm, those same 1,200 words take 6 min 33 sec. That is the figure that matters for a conference talk, a lecture or a voiceover script, and it is a minute and a half longer than the silent estimate for identical text.
The rates are taken from Marc Brysbaert’s paper “How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate”, in the Journal of Memory and Language, volume 109, 2019. It pools 190 studies covering 18,573 participants, which is why it is used here in place of the round numbers that circulate on writing blogs.
For silent reading of non-fiction the mean is 238 words per minute, with a range of 175 to 300. Fiction is read faster, at a mean of 260 wpm and a range of 200 to 320. Reading aloud is much slower: a mean of 183 wpm, drawn from 77 studies and 5,965 participants. The widely repeated claim that people average 300 words a minute does not appear anywhere in that literature.
A slow-to-fast range is shown only where the paper reports one. Choose reading aloud, or type in a rate of your own, and the range disappears rather than being manufactured — a spread invented around a centre would be fiction dressed up as measurement.
The badge rounds up and never shows less than one minute, which is the convention nearly every publisher follows: a 40-word note is still a one-minute read, and 5 min 3 sec becomes six.
A word count is a poor model of a hard text. Dense technical material, code samples, formulae and tables are all worked through far more slowly than prose, and some of them are not read left to right at all. Treat the result as a floor — the least time the piece can take — rather than a prediction of what any particular person will spend on it.
Because the badge rounds up to a whole minute and never goes below one. Promising five minutes and taking six irritates a reader; rounding the other way costs nothing.
Non-fiction at 238 wpm suits articles, documentation and reports. Fiction at 260 suits narrative. Use the aloud rate of 183 for anything spoken, and set your own figure if you have timed a real audience.
The meta-analysis reports a mean for reading aloud without a range, and it reports neither for a rate you have typed in yourself. Rather than invent a spread around those numbers, the tool shows none.
That figure is repeated widely and is not supported by the research summarised above. Three hundred words a minute is the fast end of the measured range for silent non-fiction reading, not the middle of it.