Reading time calculator
How long a text takes to read — at a pace you choose.
The estimate is your word count divided by the pace, so changing the pace changes the answer rather than hiding it behind one built-in number. A silent reader of English prose averages about 238 words a minute; reading aloud is nearer 150, and presenting with pauses nearer 130. Your own pace is the one to type in if you know it. Up to 200,000 characters.
Result
Start typing and the result appears here. No button needed.
Reading time calculator, without the extra steps.
Work out how long a text takes at a pace you set, or turn the question around: say how many minutes you have and see how many words fit. Silent reading, reading aloud, and presenting are three different speeds, and the difference decides whether a five-minute talk is 650 words or 1,200.
How to use this tool
- 1Paste the draft, post, or script.
- 2Set the pace — the presets cover silent reading, reading aloud, and presenting — or type your own.
- 3Switch to How many words fit when you have a fixed slot to fill.
When Reading time calculator is the right tool
- A conference slot is five minutes and the script has to fit, including the pauses.
- A blog post needs an honest "7 min read" label rather than a guess.
- A voiceover has to land under 30 seconds, so the word budget matters more than the word count.
- A newsletter is running long and you want to know how much to cut to get back under four minutes.
The pace is the whole answer
Dividing a word count by one built-in number gives an estimate that is wrong for most uses of it. Silent reading of English prose averages about 238 words a minute; reading the same text aloud is nearer 150, and delivering it as a talk, with pauses and emphasis, nearer 130. That is the difference between a five-minute slot holding 1,190 words and holding 650 — so the pace is a control you set, with the three common speeds one click away and your own measured pace welcome in the field.
The useful question is often backwards
Writers with a fixed slot do not want to know how long their draft takes; they want to know how much to write, or how much to cut. How many words fit answers that directly: give it the minutes and the pace, and it states the budget, then how far the text you have pasted sits from it. Over and under are shown as a number of words rather than a percentage, because words are the thing you can actually add or delete.
What an estimate cannot know
This is arithmetic on a word count, and it is honest about that. It does not know that your material is dense, that slide three has a demo, that a reader will stop to study a table, or that you speed up when nervous. Treat the figure as a planning number and time yourself once against it — after which you can type your real pace into the field and every later estimate on this page becomes yours rather than an average.
A few quick answers.
About 238 words a minute for silent reading of English prose, which is the average from a review of reading-rate studies. Reading aloud is much slower, around 150, and presenting with pauses and emphasis is slower still, nearer 130. If you have timed yourself, type that number in — a measured pace beats any average.
Switch to How many words fit, set 5 minutes and a speaking pace, and the budget appears — roughly 650 words at 130 words a minute, or 750 at 150. If you have already written something, it also shows how far over or under that budget you are.
Both pages use the same word count and the same default pace, so they cannot disagree about the same text. The Word counter gives you the estimate as one stat among several; this page exists for when the pace itself is the variable, or when you need the reverse answer.
Yes, exactly — both use the browser's Unicode word segmentation and the same default pace, so the same text cannot produce two different estimates on two pages of this site. The difference is what each page is for: one reports several measurements at a glance, this one makes the pace and the direction of the question adjustable.
Probably not at a prose pace. Readers skim code blocks or stop and study them, and neither behaviour is 238 words a minute. Paste the prose alone for the label, or time yourself reading a representative section and use that pace instead.
Because a script that runs 5 min 40 s and one that runs 5 min 5 s are different problems when the slot is six minutes. The exact figure is shown; round it yourself when you are writing a label, where 6 min read is friendlier than 5 min 40 s.