Reading Time Calculator
Paste text or enter a word count and see how long it takes to read silently or aloud at a pace you choose, with a chart of common document lengths. The average pace, 238 words a minute, comes from a meta-analysis of 190 reading studies; enter your own if you know it.
Your text
0 words. The text stays on this page and is not sent to ParrotNotes.
Switches to speaking paces (110, 140 and 170 words a minute).
A convention, not a measurement. Change it to suit your document.
Reading time
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- Words
- 0
- Pace
- 238 words a minute
- Text
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The same text at each pace
- Slow (175 a minute)
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- Average (238 a minute)
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- Fast (300 a minute)
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- Fiction (260 a minute)
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Time = words ÷ words a minute, plus the image allowance. The paces are averages from published studies; your readers will differ.
The words are counted in your browser. What you paste is not sent to ParrotNotes and is not put in the page address; only the numbers are, so you can share the result.
Common lengths at 238 words a minute
| Document | Words | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Short email | 150 | 38 sec |
| One-page memo | 500 | 2 min 6 sec |
| Article | 1,000 | 4 min 12 sec |
| Report | 5,000 | 21 min 1 sec |
| 300-page book | 75,000 | 5 hr 15 min 8 sec |
The word counts are assumptions for the chart (the book at 250 words a page), not measurements. Paste your own text for the real figure.
Reading it out loud? The Read aloud switch uses the speaking paces of the Speech Time Calculator, which also adds pauses for slides and turns minutes back into words.
How reading time is calculated
Reading time = words ÷ words a minute. A 1,200-word pre-read at the average silent pace of 238 words a minute takes 1,200 ÷ 238 = 5.04 minutes, or 5 minutes 3 seconds. Paste the text and the calculator counts the words for you; type a count if you already have one.
Images, charts and tables take time too. The calculator adds a fixed allowance per image, 10 seconds unless you change it. That is a convention used by reading-time labels, not a measurement: a dense chart takes longer, a decorative photo less.
Words per minute reading: what the research says
Most reading-time labels on the web use 200 or 250 words a minute without saying where the number comes from. This page uses Brysbaert (2019), a meta-analysis of 190 studies with 18,573 participants: adults read English non-fiction silently at 238 words a minute on average and fiction at 260. The spread between readers is large, so the paper gives 175 to 300 words a minute as the better summary for non-fiction; those are the slow and fast presets here.
The figures hold for native readers aged 18 to 60 without reading difficulties. Children, older adults and people reading in a second language are slower, and a dense technical document reads slower than a memo. Treat the result as a planning figure, and time one reader if the number matters.
Reading silently vs reading aloud
Reading aloud is much slower than reading silently: the same meta-analysis puts the average oral reading rate at 183 words a minute. Switch on Read aloud and the presets change to the speaking paces of the Speech Time Calculator, 110, 140 and 170 words a minute, which are rules of thumb for a talk rather than measurements.
Use the switch for a script, a voice-over or a reading at an event. For a presentation with slides and pauses, the Speech Time Calculator adds those and turns minutes back into words.
Common document lengths at a glance
The chart under the calculator shows how long typical documents take at the pace you chose. The lengths are assumptions chosen to be easy to remember: a short email of 150 words, a one-page memo of 500, a 1,000-word article, a 5,000-word report and a 300-page book at 250 words a page, or 75,000 words. Your email or report will differ; paste it and the calculator uses the real count.
At 238 words a minute that is 38 seconds for the email, about 2 minutes for the memo, 4 minutes 12 seconds for the article, 21 minutes for the report and a little over 5 hours for the book, which is why a pre-read longer than a few pages rarely gets read before the meeting.
The paces are averages from published studies, not a measurement of your readers. The image allowance and the document lengths in the chart are conventions. If the number matters, time one reader.
Source for the reading paces:
Sending a pre-read or writing for readers? See how to run effective meetings, the meeting agenda template, AI for journalists, how to give a technical presentation.
The next pre-read writes itself
The pre-read for a meeting is often the summary of the last one. Record the meeting with ParrotNotes and you get the summary and action items, so the pre-read for the next one is already written.
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