Reading time calculator

How to use it

1. Paste your text — the estimate appears as you type, there is no button to press.
2. Leave the speed on “Average” for a typical adult reader, or switch to Careful (180 wpm) for dense material and Fast (300 wpm) for light, familiar prose.
3. Pick “Custom” when you need to match another platform — many assume somewhere between 180 and 300 words per minute.
4. Use “Copy estimate” to paste the whole result as one line into a draft or brief.

Example

Reading time labels are a promise to the reader, and a promise is only useful when it is honest. Nearly every tool does the same two things: count the units in the text, then divide them by an assumed reading speed. That assumed speed decides everything. At 180 words a minute this paragraph takes far longer than at 300, although not one word has changed. Dense writing slows real readers down; familiar writing speeds them up. Treat every number here as planning, never as a stopwatch.

Reading time 22 s · at 238 words per minute · Aloud 28 s · Words 86 · Characters 487

86 words divided by 238 words per minute is 21.7 seconds, shown as 22 s. “Aloud” is fixed at 183 words per minute and never moves when you change the reading speed — speaking pace has nothing to do with the reading assumption.

Rules, limits and known issues

• The assumed speed decides everything, so it is always shown next to the result. English defaults to 238 words per minute from Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies and 18,573 readers; Arabic uses 181 words per minute from that paper’s Arabic sample; Chinese counts characters at 400 per minute, a figure supported by Chinese reading research and consistent with the 390 characters per minute derived from the same review.
• Chinese is timed by characters, not words. Chinese has no word spaces, so any tool that splits on spaces reports “under 1 minute” for a full page of Chinese; this one counts characters and divides by characters per minute. The word count is still shown, from dictionary segmentation, but it does not affect the estimate.
• Chinese and Japanese word counts are dictionary-based estimates and can vary by one or two words between ICU versions — another reason they stay out of the maths.
• Aloud uses oral reading rates, not presentation pacing: 183 wpm for English, 142 wpm for Arabic, and 230 characters per minute for Chinese (derived from the review’s Chinese reading-aloud figure using the same characters-per-word ratio). For slide-driven talks, aim lower and leave room for pauses.
• Times are given to the second and are never rounded up to whole minutes, so 1,000 words at 250 and at 300 wpm give different answers. Above one hour the seconds are dropped, because nothing meaningful rides on them.
• No bonus time for images or other media. Some platforms add about 12 seconds per image, but a text box cannot count images, so we would only be guessing.
• Not offered: readability scores such as Flesch (they do not hold for Chinese or Arabic), page or manuscript conversions, and sentence or paragraph counts — their rules cannot be verified.
• Nothing is trimmed, normalized or rewritten: line breaks, code and invisible characters are counted as part of your text.
• The estimate is planning, not a stopwatch. Individual readers, second-language reading, small screens and dense material all move the real number well away from any average.
• Nothing is uploaded, stored or put into the URL: the calculation happens in this page and leaves nothing behind when you close the tab.

Related writing tools

Reading time is usually one number in a longer editing job.