Reading Time Calculator

Written byOleh Soloninupdated 25 September 2026

What you know

Amount

Silent speed, words a minute

Reading speed depends on the reader, the language, the text and how much you need to understand; measure your own over a page.

Aloud speed, words a minute

Audiobooks are recommended at 150–160. Reading aloud measured across 17 languages came to 184 ± 29 words a minute — 228 ± 30 in English, 161 ± 18 in Finnish — and close to 1,000 characters a minute in every one of them.

Advanced options

Characters per word

Only needed if you entered the length in characters. The exact figure: characters with spaces ÷ words in your own file.

Minutes a slide

A slide presentation sits closer to 100–125 words a minute, slower than reading aloud.

Result

Silently23 min
Aloud33 min
Words5,000
Silently, minutes22.7
Aloud, minutes33.3
For a presentation17 slides at 2 min each
How it was worked out
5000 words ÷ 220 wpm = 22.7 min silently; ÷ 150 = 33.3 min aloud

Aloud takes considerably longer

Reading time calculator: enter a word or character count to see how long the text takes to read silently, how long it takes aloud, and roughly how many slides a talk of that length needs.

Reading silently and reading aloud are two different speeds: at 220 and 150 words a minute the first is almost half as fast again. Five thousand words take 23 minutes silently and 33 aloud: the voice cannot keep up with the eye. For a talk, the second figure is the one that matters.

A 2012 study measured reading aloud across seventeen languages at 184 ± 29 words a minute — 228 ± 30 in English, 161 ± 18 in Finnish. The word counts differ because average word length does; the character rate lands near 1,000 a minute in every one of those languages.

Both speeds here are input fields rather than baked-in constants, because your own is easy to measure: read a page with a stopwatch and divide.

How to use

Choose whether your length is in words or characters.
Enter the amount from your document's statistics.
Keep the default speeds or replace them: 220 words a minute silently, 150 aloud.
Read off the silent time, the spoken time and how many slides the text covers at your pace.

Five thousand words at different speeds

Every row is a run of this calculator over 5,000 words. The top four are silent reading, the bottom four are aloud.

Calculator runs at 5,000 words.
How it is read	Words a minute	Time for 5,000 words	Where the speed comes from
Silently, for comprehension	200	25 min	lower end of ordinary reading
Silently, for comprehension	230	21.7 min	upper end
Silently, the default here	220	22.7 min	inside that band
Skimming	700	7.1 min	the rate skimming runs at
Aloud, audiobook pace	150	33.3 min	recommended for audiobooks
Aloud, 17-language average	184	27.2 min	2012 measurement
Aloud, English	228	21.9 min	2012 measurement
Slide presentation	125	40 min	comfortable presenting pace

Where the limits sit

Figures of 200–230 words a minute are given for reading with comprehension and 700 and above for skimming; in practice speed depends on the reader, the language and the text, and skimming costs comprehension.

Reading faster than 900 words a minute — in the sense of capturing and decoding every word on the page — is not feasible, because of the limits set by the anatomy of the eye. Claims of 1,000 words a minute, the cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene has said, must be viewed with skepticism.

Proofreading is slower still: about 200 words a minute on paper and 180 on a monitor, from studies run on pre-1992 displays. Slide presentations sit closer to 100–125 words a minute for a comfortable pace, well below ordinary reading aloud.

What this calculator shows

Reading time silently and aloud
The word count when the input is characters
Roughly how many slides the text fills

What to keep in mind

The defaults are 220 words a minute silently and 150 aloud; your own speed is best measured by reading a page against a stopwatch.
Technical text with formulas reads considerably slower, and aloud it also needs pauses.

FAQs

How long does it take to read 5,000 words?

About 23 minutes silently at 220 words a minute, and 33 minutes aloud at 150. Skimming at 700 words a minute brings it down to seven, at the cost of comprehension.

How fast do people read aloud?

A study across seventeen languages found 184 ± 29 words a minute: 228 ± 30 in English, 161 ± 18 in Finnish. Audiobooks are recommended at 150–160, the range listeners are comfortable with.

What is a normal reading speed?

200–230 words a minute for reading with comprehension. Anything much above 700 is skimming rather than reading: the eye is hunting for cues, not decoding every word.

Can you learn to read 1,000 words a minute?

Not in the sense of decoding every word — the anatomy of the eye caps that below 900. Speed-reading courses teach skimming, which is a useful skill but gives a different kind of understanding of the text.

How long will a 15-slide talk run?

Thirty minutes at two minutes a slide, which takes about 4,500 words at 150 words a minute. This calculator works the other way round: give it the text and the minutes per slide, and it returns the slide count.

Why does entering characters give a different answer?

Because characters are converted to words by dividing by the word length. The default is six characters; for your own text, divide characters with spaces by the word count in your document's statistics.

Is reading from a screen slower?

When proofreading, yes: about 200 words a minute on paper against 180 on a monitor. Those figures come from studies on displays older than 1992, and the gap is considered smaller on modern screens.

Worked example

A 5,000-word talk

Input: 5,000 words, 220 silently, 150 aloud, two minutes a slide

Output: 23 min silently, 33 min aloud, 17 slides

Note: Delivered at presentation pace — 125 words a minute — the same text stretches to 40 minutes.

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Result

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