Reading time and speaking time

Reading time estimates are everywhere — on articles, in learning platforms, at the top of internal documents — and almost all of them use the same number, 200 words per minute, for which nobody can produce a source. Here is where the better figures come from and how far they can be trusted.

The number we use, and why

Our reading time assumes 238 words per minute. That comes from Marc Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis in the Journal of Memory and Language, which pooled 190 studies covering more than 18,000 participants. It is the most thoroughly grounded figure available for adults reading English non-fiction silently, for comprehension rather than skimming.

The same analysis reports around 260 words per minute for fiction, which is faster for the obvious reason: narrative prose has more predictable vocabulary and simpler syntax than expository text, so less of it needs re-reading.

The spread matters as much as the mean. Individual adults in these studies range from roughly 175 to 300 words per minute at normal comprehension. A reading time estimate is therefore accurate to about ±25 per cent for any particular person, which is fine for “is this a coffee-length article or a lunch-length one” and useless for scheduling.

The 200 words per minute problem

If you trace the 200 wpm figure back through the tools that use it, the trail ends in other tools. It appears to be a round number that became conventional through repetition rather than measurement. Using it makes every article look about 16 per cent longer than the evidence suggests it is.

This matters less than it sounds for a blog post and more than it sounds for a curriculum, a reading list, or anything where the estimate is used to plan someone else's time.

Reading time at a glance

Speaking time is a different measurement

Speaking is much slower than reading, and the useful range is narrower. Our estimate uses 150 words per minute, which is a comfortable, clear presentation pace. For context:

• 100–130 wpm — deliberate. Ceremonial speech, difficult technical material, an audience listening in a second language.
• 130–160 wpm — the presentation range. Most good conference speakers live here.
• 160–180 wpm — conversational. Fine in a podcast, fast from a stage.
• 200 wpm and above — auctioneers, sports commentary, and people who have realised they are running out of time.

Speech length targets

Write to the lower number

The single most useful piece of advice about speaking time is to write your script to the slow end of the range. Almost nobody delivers a talk faster than they rehearsed it, and several things reliably add minutes that a word count cannot see:

• Pauses. The silence after a point lands is doing real work, and a talk without any is exhausting to listen to. Budget for it.
• Slide transitions and the small recovery pause after each.
• Demonstrations, which never take the time they took in rehearsal.
• Questions, if they are taken during rather than after.
• Getting to the lectern, adjusting the microphone, and the first thirty seconds of settling.

A 20-minute slot is realistically 17 minutes of speech. At 140 words per minute that is about 2,400 words, not the 3,000 the arithmetic suggests.

Where the estimates fail

Both figures assume continuous prose read or spoken straight through. They are unreliable for:

• Poetry, which is read far more slowly than its word count implies.
• Reference material that is consulted rather than read.
• Anything with equations or code, where the eye stops and works.
• Tables and lists, which are scanned rather than read.
• Text in a second language, which can run at half speed or less.

The counter gives you both figures automatically alongside every other count, so you can sanity-check a draft's length without doing the arithmetic yourself.

Common questions