Reading time calculator

The default rate is 238 words a minute, which is the mean for adult silent reading of English non-fiction in Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis of nearly 200 studies. A thousand words is about four minutes.

The single rate hides real variation. Brysbaert found roughly 238 words a minute for non-fiction and about 260 for fiction, with individuals spread widely around both. Dense technical material with code or equations runs far slower, because readers stop and re-read rather than moving linearly. Speed-reading claims of a thousand words a minute do not survive comprehension testing — what is being measured there is skimming, which is a useful skill and a different one. As a practical matter, the "5 min read" label on an article is doing something other than informing you precisely: it is setting an expectation, and rounding to the nearest minute is entirely adequate for that.