Reading speed test and reading time calculator

Press Start, read the story at the pace you would read a magazine article, and press Done on the last word. The test divides the 333 words by the minutes you took. Three short questions follow. They do not change the number, but a fast time with two wrong answers is a skim, not a reading speed.

The story was written for this page in plain, everyday words. That makes it easier than most non-fiction, so expect a result a little above what you would manage on a dense report. And one short passage on a screen is a rough measure, not a lab test. Take it twice, on different days if you can, and plan with the slower result.

The best summary is a 2019 meta-analysis by Marc Brysbaert of Ghent University, published in the Journal of Memory and Language. It pooled 190 studies with 18,573 participants. The average silent reading speed for adults in English was 238 words per minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. Most adults read non-fiction at 175 to 300 wpm, and fiction at 200 to 320.

Those numbers are lower than the 300 wpm figure that still gets repeated, and the paper reviews why the older estimates ran high. Reading aloud averaged 183 wpm. Speeds were lower for children, for older adults and for people reading in a second language.

So a result of 210 is not slow. It sits inside the normal range, with plenty of room for a daily reading habit.

Under the test, the calculator turns a word count into reading time. Paste text and it counts the words in your browser, or type the count. It starts at 238 wpm, the non-fiction average, and switches to your own speed when you finish the test.

It also shows two slower times. Read aloud uses 183 wpm, the average from the same review. As a talk uses 130 wpm, which is this page's allowance for a speaker who pauses and changes slides: an assumption, not a research figure. A script that reads in six minutes silently takes about eleven to deliver at that pace, before questions.

The averages assume general prose. Technical material, anything with equations, or a language you read less well can slow you down a lot without you noticing. If the estimate matters, time yourself on a page of the real material and type that speed into the calculator.

Probably not by much. Brysbaert's review found no evidence for separate reading "gears" beyond the difference between reading and scanning a page for a word. If your speed jumps on a second try but the questions go wrong, you skimmed.

For a reading habit, minutes matter more than speed. At 238 wpm, 20 minutes a day is about 4,760 words, or roughly 33,000 a week. Reading 20 wpm slower costs 400 words a day, about 2,800 a week. Skipping one day a week costs 4,760. The missed day is the bigger leak.

In BeHabitual a reading habit can be a timer habit: the minutes go into the month grid, and the grid shows whether the twenty minutes happen on most days or only on Sundays. Speed is worth testing once or twice a year. The minutes are worth looking at every week.