Reading Time Calculator

A reading-time estimate is words divided by a reading rate. Which rate, and measured how, is most of the question — and many tools use a rate higher than the evidence supports.

Where 238 words per minute comes from

In 2019 Marc Brysbaert published "How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate" in the Journal of Memory and Language. From 190 studies and 18,573 participants he estimated the average silent reading rate for adults at 238 words per minute for non-fiction. The studies are of native readers aged 18 to 60 in languages written in the Latin alphabet, most of them English; the English rows alone average 236. His 260 for fiction comes from a separate study of 48 people each reading a book. He found that "most adults fall in the range of 175–300 wpm" for non-fiction. Reading aloud, from 77 studies, averaged 183. Crucially, he concluded that these estimates "are lower than the numbers often cited in scientific and popular writings" — the familiar 250 or 300 wpm figures overstate how fast people read.

Adults read English non-fiction silently at about 238 words a minute — slower than the figures usually quoted, not faster.

Who reads slower

The same study reports that reading rates are lower for children, for older adults and for readers with English as a second language, and that within any group there are reliable individual differences. It also explains the fiction–non-fiction gap by word length: non-fiction uses longer words. For an audience reading in a second language, or for technical material, lower the rate and the estimate becomes more honest.

Chinese and Japanese are timed by character

Chinese and Japanese are written without spaces, so there is no word count to divide. The tool counts Chinese characters, and Japanese kanji and kana, leaving punctuation out, and divides by a characters-per-minute rate: 255 for Chinese and 357 for Japanese by default. Those are the IReST norms (Trauzettel-Klosinski and Dietz, Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, 2012), measured with native readers aged 18 to 35 who read standard passages aloud against a stopwatch. A line containing any kana is treated as Japanese. Mixed text is the sum of its parts: English words at the words-a-minute rate plus the characters at theirs.

Silent reading is faster than reading aloud — Brysbaert's review gives Chinese 260 words a minute silently against 152 aloud — but there is no agreed silent rate in characters: his estimate depends on how many characters make a word, and we found no silent-reading figure for Japanese at all. If you know how fast your readers read, set the rate. Thai, Lao, Khmer and Burmese are also written without spaces; your browser's word segmenter counts them, but none of these sources gives a rate, so the tool says "Not estimated" rather than guess.

What we changed on 18 October 2026

Chinese, Japanese and Thai text used to show a reading time of "0 sec" beside a Words count in the thousands, because only space-separated words were timed. Chinese and Japanese are now timed as described above, and text that cannot be timed says so. The estimate is rounded to the minute, as our own FAQ advises, rather than given to the second. A reading speed of 0, a negative number or a non-number now gives a message instead of silently becoming 238, and the code inside <script> and <style> tags is no longer counted as words. We also removed a heading claiming that reading-time labels lift engagement, which nothing we found supports, and speed hints of 180 for "slow" and 500 for "skim", which no source we opened gives.

What we changed on 30 September 2026

Words are now counted by the same code as our PDF Word Counter. Before, a paragraph in Chinese, Japanese or Thai — scripts written without spaces — counted as a single word; those words are now found with your browser's word segmenter and reported, though not timed, because the 238 wpm rate is measured for English words. We also removed advice that had no source: a claimed 10–15% fall in bounce rate from reading-time badges, an "average top-ranking page of 2,000 words", and a sharp drop in retention "past 12 minutes".

Length and search

Google's guidance on helpful content includes a self-assessment question: "Are you writing to a particular word count because you've heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don't.)" A reading-time estimate is for your readers, to help them decide whether they have time now — not a target.