Read Time Calculator
Explain like I'm 5 (what even is this calculator?)
Paste a bit of writing in. It counts the words and gives you an estimated reading time, silent and out loud, using typical reading speeds. Handy for working out whether a blog post, a speech, a script, or an email is the right length for the job.
Read time
0 sec silent, 0 sec aloud
Counts
- Words0
- Characters (with spaces)0
- Characters (no spaces)0
- Sentences0
- Silent read time0 sec
- Aloud read time0 sec
Show workings
How long should a thing be?
Rough guidance, not rules. A blog post that earns its keep in search is usually 800 to 2,000 words (4 to 10 minutes silent). A conference talk is roughly 140 to 160 words per minute of slot, so a 20-minute talk is about 3,000 words of script, a 45-minute keynote around 6,500. A best-man speech is best under 5 minutes (about 700 words). An email newsletter that gets read is closer to 300 words than 1,500. A single tweet, well, you know the limit.
Reading for comprehension of dense material, technical documentation or legal text, is slower than reading a novel. If your audience is working through something serious, halve your silent WPM and the estimate will be closer to the truth.
Where the default numbers come from
Research on adult reading speeds (Brysbaert 2019 meta-analysis among others) puts silent reading of typical prose in the 200 to 300 WPM range, with the mean around 238 WPM. Reading aloud is 130 to 180 WPM; professional voiceover work and newsreaders tend to sit at the upper end of that, and audiobook narration at the lower. The defaults here (250 silent, 150 aloud) are the round numbers most publishing tools have converged on.
Related calculators
Reading time is one figure on the content dashboard.
Common questions
How fast does the average person read?
Adult silent reading lands between 200 and 300 WPM for typical prose (mean around 238 WPM). Reading aloud is 130-180 WPM. Technical material is slower.
Why are read-time estimates always slightly off?
Reading speed varies with material, reader, and mood. Treat the number as an estimate, not a stopwatch. If you need precision for a specific audience, time a sample and match the WPM.
Where does my text go?
Nowhere. Everything runs in your browser. Paste a confidential draft in safely.
Does it handle Markdown, HTML or formatting?
It counts words, not tags. Markdown, HTML and other plain-text formatting are all counted as tokens, so very heavy formatting may slightly inflate the count. For almost all use cases this is close enough.