Reading time calculator
Estimate silent reading time from the word count, at a pace you can change.
Paste the passage, then change the pace if this reader is faster or slower than the default.
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Reading time
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The default pace is 238 words per minute, from a published average for adult silent reading in English. It is not a measurement of you.
—At 238 words per minute
The same word count at 150 words per minute speaking time is —. Open the speaking time calculator.
How to use the reading time calculator
- Paste the passage a person will actually read. Cut captions and bibliographies if they will not be read with the body.
- Leave 238 words per minute for a general adult audience, or pick Leisure (180), Typical adult (238), or Skim (300).
- Type another pace if you have a better measurement. The result shows hours, minutes, and seconds, not a vague “about a minute” for long texts.
- If the words will be spoken, switch to the speaking time calculator instead of slowing this one down and hoping.
What the default does and does not mean
Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis put the average silent reading rate for adults reading English non-fiction near 238 words per minute. That is why 238 is the default, and why theword counter shows a reading summary at the same pace. The average hides a wide spread. A reader in a hurry, a reader who is new to the subject, and a reader of fiction are not the same person. The presets are labels for planning, not clinical categories. Leisure is simply a slower round number. Skim is a faster one. Neither is a measured mode inside this site.
The arithmetic is words divided by the pace, times 60, then rounded to the nearest second. 187 words in the sample passage are 47 seconds at the default pace. Fifteen thousand words at the same pace are1 hour 3 minutes 2 seconds. A single word rounds to less than one second, because 60 ÷ 238 is under half a second and the display does not pretend you spent a full second on “the.”
The word total underneath uses the site’s word rule: whitespace-separated tokens with a letter or a number. Hyphenated compounds count once. If your editor counts them twice, the minutes will not match, and the place to see that rule is the word counter. Readability is related but not the same. A dense paragraph can be short in minutes and still be hard. Thereadability checker is the page for that question.
Silent reading is not the script
The line under the result shows the same word count at 150 words per minute so you can see the gap. It is not an editable speaking calculator. Pauses, applause, slides, and the habit of repeating a line are absent from both figures. If you are timing a talk, usespeaking time and paste the words you will say, not the stage directions, unless you will say those too.
Limitations
- The estimate assumes continuous reading in a language that splits words with spaces. It is a poor fit for classical Chinese and for text that is mostly tables.
- It does not slow down for jargon, foreign names, or equations. Those are why a specialist paper can miss the average by a lot.
- Images, video, and “read more” truncations are invisible. Only the text in the box is timed.
- Paces below 40 or above 1,000 words per minute are clamped. That range blocks a zero, which would make the division meaningless, and it blocks typos such as 2380.
Questions people ask
Where does 238 words per minute come from?
It is the average adult silent reading rate for English non-fiction reported by Marc Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis in the Journal of Memory and Language. It is an average across studies, not your speed and not a child’s speed. The field on this page exists so you can replace it.
Does reading time include rereading and looking things up?
No. The estimate is words divided by the pace you set, converted to hours, minutes, and seconds. It assumes continuous silent reading. Technical pages, legal clauses, and anything you stop to check will take longer than the figure.
Why is speaking time different?
People read silently faster than they speak a script clearly. The speaking default on this site is 150 words per minute, and that calculator is a separate page because the pace, the presets, and the caveats are different. This page shows the speaking figure only as a pointer.
What if I type a pace outside the allowed range?
The calculation uses a pace from 40 to 1,000 words per minute. A blank or impossible value falls back to 238 until you leave the field, and then the field is corrected. The note under the time tells you when the pace was clamped.
Will the estimate be stored with my draft?
No. The math runs in the browser. TextStats does not keep the passage or the time you calculated.