Paste the same article into three different tools and get three different answers. There is a reason, and it is more interesting than rounding.
You have seen the badge a thousand times. 4 min read. 7 min read. It sits under the headline and quietly makes a promise about your afternoon.
What it does not tell you is that the site made the number up — not dishonestly, but by picking a reading speed and dividing. And every site picks a different one. Some use 200 words per minute, some 250, some 300. Medium has long been reported to use 265. The same 1,500-word article is therefore a five-minute read, a six-minute read or a seven-and-a-half-minute read depending on nothing but which constant the developer chose.
And the most popular choice — 300 — is one that reading researchers have specifically identified as too high.
In 2019 Marc Brysbaert, a psychologist at Ghent University, did the thing nobody had properly done: he collected 190 separate studies of reading rate, published between 1901 and 2019, covering more than 18,000 participants, and pooled them.
The criteria were strict — at least ten healthy adults aged 17 to 60, native speakers, reading normal continuous text silently for comprehension with the whole text in view. No proofreading tasks, no lists of unconnected words, no one-word-at-a-time displays.
238 words per minute, with a 95% confidence interval of 230 to 246 and a median of 235. That is a remarkably tight result for a meta-analysis spanning 118 years.
Brysbaert was explicit that this is lower than the figures usually cited in both scientific and popular writing, and he went through why the older numbers were inflated — studies that never checked comprehension, self-reported speeds, and measurements taken under conditions that do not resemble actually reading something.
Fiction comes out about ten per cent faster at 260, and the reason is pleasingly mundane: fiction uses shorter words. Narrative does not carry you along by magic, it carries you along by being made of smaller units.
Silent reading at 238 wpm, and reading aloud at 183.
| WORDS | SILENT (238 WPM) | ALOUD (183 WPM) |
|---|---|---|
| 250 | 1 min | 1½ min |
| 500 | 2 min | 3 min |
| 750 | 3 min | 4 min |
| 1,000 | 4 min | 5½ min |
| 1,500 | 6½ min | 8 min |
| 2,000 | 8½ min | 11 min |
| 3,000 | 12½ min | 16½ min |
| 5,000 | 21 min | 27 min |
| 10,000 | 42 min | 55 min |
| 80,000 | 5½ hours | 7¼ hours |
That last row is a short novel, and it is the one people find hardest to believe. Most books are, in pure reading time, an afternoon — which says more about how rarely we read uninterrupted than about how fast we read.
183 words per minute, and the bottleneck is not comprehension. It is your mouth. Articulation is slower than reading, so speaking a text takes roughly 30% longer than reading it silently regardless of how well you know the material.
Two professional conventions sit below even that, and both are deliberate.
Audiobook narration runs around 150 to 160 words per minute. Slower than ordinary oral reading, because a listener cannot go back a line without fumbling for a button. This is why a nine-hour audiobook is roughly an 80,000-word novel — the arithmetic works out almost exactly.
Prepared speaking runs slower still, around 130 to 150. If you are timing a talk, divide by 130 rather than 183. Pauses, emphasis, drinking water and the moment where you lose your place are all real and none of them are in the word count. A twenty-minute slot is about 2,600 words, and people consistently write 4,000.
Timing something you are about to read out? Word count and reading time together, so you know before you are standing up.
Open the counter →The speed-reading industry has produced some spectacular claims. A six-time world champion has been reported as reading over 4,000 words per minute with comprehension. One trainer appeared on television claiming 25,000.
A 2016 review by Rayner and colleagues went through why anything above about 1,000 words per minute is not achievable without severe loss of understanding, and the argument is mechanical rather than a matter of opinion.
Reading is not a smooth sweep across a line. Your eyes move in short jumps — saccades — separated by brief stops called fixations, and you only take in text during the stops. The amount you can extract in one fixation is limited by the resolution of your central vision, and moving your eyes takes time. Those two constraints set a ceiling that no amount of training removes.
What speed-reading courses actually teach, when they teach anything, is skimming — which is a genuinely useful skill and a completely different activity. You are not reading faster, you are deciding not to read most of it. That is often the right call. It is not what was advertised.
Most adults sit between 175 and 300 wpm on non-fiction. If you are outside that range in either direction, that is common rather than remarkable.
A reasonable question, given that the number is a guess dressed as a measurement.
The argument for is that readers use it to decide whether to commit now or save for later, and a roughly-right estimate serves that decision fine. Nobody is scheduling around the difference between six and seven minutes.
The argument against is that it invites an unhelpful comparison. A reader who takes twelve minutes over your "6 min read" may conclude something about themselves that is not true — they may simply have been reading properly.
If you do show one, divide by 238 rather than 300, round up rather than down, and consider phrasing it as a range. Honest imprecision reads better than false confidence, and it is the same principle that applies to deciding how long a post should be in the first place.
How long does it take to read 1,000 words?
About four minutes silently, or five and a half read aloud. If it is technical material, closer to five and a half silently — dense vocabulary is the biggest single variable.
What is a good reading speed?
The fastest pace at which you still understand what you read, which for most adults is somewhere between 250 and 400 wpm. Speed without comprehension is not reading, it is scanning — useful, but a different thing.
Why does my site's estimate differ from yours?
Because it is dividing by a different number. There is no standard. Most platforms picked a figure years ago and never revisited it, which is why the same article can be a five-minute read in one place and a seven-minute read in another.
How many words is a 20-minute talk?
About 2,600, at 130 words per minute. People routinely write 4,000 and then speak faster to fit, which is the most common reason a talk feels rushed.
Can I actually train myself to read faster?
Somewhat, and mostly by removing bad habits — subvocalising every word, backtracking unnecessarily. But the physical limits of eye movement put a ceiling on it well below what speed-reading courses advertise. Skimming is learnable. Reading at 1,000 wpm is not.
Related: the complete word count guide, how long a blog post should be, words to pages, how to cut word count.
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