Words Per Minute Calculator

Timing a talk tells you how long it ran, and a transcript tells you what you said. Put the two together and you know your real pace, which is often different from your rehearsal pace. Paste the transcript, enter the recording's length and read the number.

Clean the text first if you can. Speaker names count as words, and so do timestamps; the page warns you when it spots timestamps. Pauses stay in the time, so a talk with long pauses or audience questions shows a lower pace than the speed you spoke at while talking. For a truer speaking pace, use a stretch where only you were talking.

The count splits on spaces and line breaks, and a piece counts if it has at least one letter or digit. So well-known, don't and 3.5 each count once, and a dash with spaces around it does not count. A dash with no spaces joins two words into one, and 1 000 written with a space counts as two.

Word counters differ a little on these cases, so your word processor may show a slightly different total. On a text of a few hundred words the difference hardly moves the pace.

A pace outside a band is not a problem in itself. A band says what is common, not what is right. A technical talk can do well below 110 words a minute, and a confident storyteller above 170. If people lost you, or you ran over, slowing down or cutting words are both fair fixes, and the number alone will not tell you which.

Bands in the same table were measured differently. The reading and audiobook figures come from research or from an industry guide, the talk band is a rule of thumb, and the typing figures come from a self-selected group, mostly younger people from the US who were interested in testing their typing.