Reading Time Calculator

Reading Time Calculator: How Long Will It Take to Read or Say?

Paste your text or enter a word count to see how long it takes to read silently and to say out loud. Your text stays in your browser. It is not sent anywhere and it is not stored.

Speech length calculator

Enter the minutes you have to speak to see how many words to write, or enter a word count to see how long the speech will run. It is a words to minutes calculator that works in both directions, at a slow, steady and fast speaking pace.

How many words for common speech lengths

What the readability score means for employee communications

The Flesch Reading Ease score runs from 0 to 100. The formula can go outside that range, and the calculator shows those results as 0 or 100. A higher score means shorter sentences and shorter words, which most people read faster and with less effort.

• For a message to all employees, a score of 60 or above is a sensible target. People read work messages between tasks, on phones and often in a second language.
• The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level turns the same measures into a US school grade. Grade 8 is roughly age 13 to 14. A lower grade is no insult to your readers. It means less effort for them.
• To raise the score, split sentences over 25 words and swap long words for short ones, such as “buy” for “purchase” and “help” for “assistance”.
• The score only measures sentence and word length. It cannot tell you whether the message is clear, accurate or well structured, so use it as a check and still ask a colleague to read the draft.

How the calculator works

Reading time and speaking time: words to minutes

Time equals the word count divided by the speed in words a minute.

• Silent reading default: 238 words a minute. This is the average for adults reading non-fiction in English, from a review of 190 studies by Marc Brysbaert published in the Journal of Memory and Language in 2019. The same review gives 260 words a minute for fiction and 183 words a minute for reading aloud. Brysbaert (2019), How many words do we read per minute?
• Speaking default: 130 words a minute. VirtualSpeech gives 100 to 150 words a minute as a comfortable pace for presentations, and reports a US National Center for Voice and Speech figure of about 150 words a minute for conversation. We chose 130 from the middle of that range. It is not a measured average. VirtualSpeech, Average speaking rate and words per minute

Worked example: a 600 word leadership update. Silent reading is 600 divided by 238, which is 2.52 minutes, or about 2 minutes 31 seconds. Speaking is 600 divided by 130, which is 4.62 minutes, or about 4 minutes 37 seconds.

People differ. Change the speeds if you know your own pace, and use the speaking time as a speech length calculator for scripts, town halls and video voiceovers.

Words per minute reading test: find your own speed

You can run a simple words per minute reading test with this page. Paste a passage to get its word count, time yourself reading it, then divide the words by the minutes. For example, 600 words read in 3 minutes is 200 words a minute. Enter your own figure in the speed boxes to get times that fit you. Do the same out loud to find your speaking speed.

Readability formulas

• Flesch Reading Ease = 206.835 minus (1.015 x average words per sentence) minus (84.6 x average syllables per word).
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level = (0.39 x average words per sentence) plus (11.8 x average syllables per word) minus 15.59.

Example: a text with 100 words, 5 sentences and 150 syllables has 20 words per sentence and 1.5 syllables per word. The Flesch Reading Ease score is 59.6 and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is 9.9.

How things are counted: a word is any group of characters between spaces that contains a letter or a number. A sentence ends at a period (full stop), question mark or exclamation mark, or at the end of a line, so headings and bullet points each count as a sentence. A number written in digits counts as one syllable.

Questions about reading time

How long does it take to read 1,000 words?

At the default silent reading speed of 238 words a minute, 1,000 words takes about 4 minutes 12 seconds to read. Read aloud at 130 words a minute, the same text takes about 7 minutes 42 seconds. Dense or technical writing takes longer.

How many words is a 5 minute speech?

At a steady presentation pace of 130 words a minute, a 5 minute speech is about 650 words. A slower speaker at 100 words a minute needs about 500 words, and a faster speaker at 150 words a minute needs about 750. Leave room for pauses, slides and questions.

How do I calculate the length of a speech?

Divide the word count by your speaking pace in words a minute. A 1,300 word script takes 10 minutes at a steady 130 words a minute, 13 minutes at a slow 100 words a minute and 8 minutes 40 seconds at a fast 150 words a minute. To go the other way, multiply the minutes by the pace. The speech length calculator on this page does both.

What is a good Flesch reading ease score?

Higher scores are easier to read. Rudolf Flesch described 60 to 70 as standard and scores below 50 as difficult. For messages that go to all employees, 60 or above is a sensible target. Specialist or legal documents often score lower.

How does the calculator work out reading time?

It divides the word count by a reading speed in words a minute. The default silent speed is 238 words a minute, the average for adults reading non-fiction in English in a 2019 review of 190 studies by Marc Brysbaert. The default speaking speed is 130 words a minute. You can change both speeds.

Is my text stored or sent anywhere?

No. The calculator runs in your browser. The text you paste is not sent to a server, saved or stored, and it is gone when you close or reload the page.