Reading Time Estimator
Articles, documentation, reports — the default for web copy.
The rate actually used. Change it and the preset becomes your own.
Reading time
32 sec
125 words at 238 words per minute. A site would print this as “1 min read”.
A slow reader: 43 sec. A fast one: 25 sec.
How this was worked out
- Words counted125 — runs between spaces, plus one per Han character or kana
- Rate used238 wpm — Silent reading, non-fiction
- Time125 ÷ 238 × 60 = 32 sec
- Rounded for the badgeceil(32 ÷ 60) = 1, never below 1
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 leave the moment you set the rate yourself. The spread inside one of those ranges matters more than the gap between them: the same non-fiction page takes a slow adult reader nearly twice as long as a fast one, while reading it aloud adds about a third to the silent time rather than doubling it.
A word here is a run of characters between spaces, so “isn’t” and “state-of-the-art” count once each — which is how the studies counted them. Chinese and Japanese are not written with spaces, so each Han character and each kana counts as one unit instead; the rates above were measured on English readers, so for those scripts set your own. Characters are counted as a reader sees them, which is why an emoji counts once rather than twice.
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.
The number behind a “6 min read”
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 worked example: 1,200 words
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.
Where the rates come from
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.
Why the estimate is a floor
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.
Why the badge rounds up
Why does the badge say six minutes when the estimate is 5 min 3 sec?
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.
Which rate should I pick?
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.
Why is there no slow and fast range when I choose reading aloud?
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.
Is the average reading speed not 300 words a minute?
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.