By the clock
Reading time calculator
How long will a book take? Enter its pages or its word count and a reading speed, and see the time it needs and how many days that is at a few minutes a day.
Reading time
5 h 38 min
88,000 words at 260 words a minute
- At 15 minutes a day
- 23 days
- At 30 minutes a day
- 12 days
- At an hour a day
- 6 days
An average, not a promise: speeds differ a lot from reader to reader, and with the book. Measure your own speed for a better guess.
Measure your reading speed
Read the short story below at your normal pace, as if for pleasure, then press “I’ve finished”.
The story is 299 words long and appears when you start the clock.
The bookshop on Quarry Lane kept odd hours. It opened when the owner, a tall woman named Ines, had finished her first pot of tea, and it closed when the light through the front window turned the colour of weak honey. Nobody minded. People who came to Quarry Lane came for the shop, and they had learned to arrive in the afternoon.
That Thursday a boy of about twelve came in out of the rain, shook himself like a dog on the mat, and asked whether she had any books about lighthouses. Ines said she had three, and one of them was mostly about the people who had lived in them, which was the best kind. She found it on the top shelf, behind a row of cookery books that had wandered there in the spring.
The boy sat on the low stool by the poetry section and read for a long time. He turned the pages slowly, the way people do when they are trying to remember something rather than just reach the end. Once he laughed out loud, and once he went very quiet and looked at the window for a while.
When the light began to change, he came to the counter and counted out his coins in small towers. He was short by forty pence. Ines looked at the towers, then at the rain, which had not stopped, and said that books about lighthouses were half price on Thursdays. It was not true, and they both knew it was not true, but he thanked her very seriously and put the book inside his coat to keep it dry.
She turned the sign on the door and left a lamp burning in the window, as she always did, in case someone needed to find the way.
Your result
Your words per minute will appear here when you finish.
How the estimate works
Reading time is the number of words divided by your words per minute. A 320-page paperback with about 275 words a page holds roughly 88,000 words; at 260 words a minute that is about five and a half hours.
The speeds in the list come from a review of 190 studies of adult readers by Marc Brysbaert (2019): on average, adults read English non-fiction silently at about 238 words a minute, fiction at about 260, and aloud at about 183. They are averages; people vary widely, and the same reader slows down for dense text or a new subject.
To count words per page, take a full page, count the words in five full lines, divide by five and multiply by the number of lines on the page. Do this for two or three pages and take the average.
The test above times you on a 299-word story written for this site. Read it as you would a novel, not as fast as you can; the two questions afterwards are only a check that you took it in.
Sources
- Marc Brysbaert, “How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate”, Journal of Memory and Language 109 (2019), 104047 (doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047): average silent reading rates of 238 words a minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction, and 183 for reading aloud.
- Words per page for each kind of book are rough starting points chosen for this calculator, not measurements; count your own book for a better figure.
Questions
What is a good reading speed?
There is no single good speed. Brysbaert’s review puts the adult average for silent reading of English at about 238 words a minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. Reading much faster usually means skimming and remembering less.
How many words are on a page?
It depends on the page size, the type and the margins, so the presets are only a starting point. Counting a few lines of your own copy, as described above, gives a much better number.
Does the test save my result?
No. The timing happens in your browser and nothing is stored or sent; press “Use this speed above” to carry your result into the calculator.