At the average adult silent reading speed of 238 words per minute, 1,000 words takes about 4 minutes, 5,000 words about 21 minutes, and 10,000 words about 42 minutes. Reading aloud runs slower, roughly 1.3 times longer, because speech has a physical speed limit that silent reading does not.
The 238 WPM figure comes from the largest review of the research, a 2019 meta-analysis by Marc Brysbaert pooling 190 studies. It is the most defensible number for an average adult reading general non-fiction silently. Your own pace shifts with the material and how closely you read, so treat the table below as a starting point, not a stopwatch.
Word count to reading time table
Silent reading at 238 WPM. To convert any length yourself, divide the word count by 238 to get minutes.
| Words | Silent reading time | Reading aloud |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | under 1 min | under 1 min |
| 250 | about 1 min | about 1.5 min |
| 500 | about 2 min | about 3 min |
| 750 | about 3 min | about 4 min |
| 1,000 | about 4 min | about 5 min |
| 1,500 | about 6 min | about 8 min |
| 2,000 | about 8 min | about 11 min |
| 2,500 | about 11 min | about 14 min |
| 3,000 | about 13 min | about 16 min |
| 4,000 | about 17 min | about 22 min |
| 5,000 | about 21 min | about 27 min |
| 7,500 | about 32 min | about 41 min |
| 10,000 | about 42 min | about 55 min |
| 20,000 | about 1 hr 24 min | about 1 hr 49 min |
| 50,000 | about 3 hr 30 min | about 4 hr 33 min |
| 90,000 | about 6 hr 18 min | about 8 hr 12 min |
A 90,000-word novel at silent pace is roughly a full working day of reading. A typical 1,200-word blog post lands at about 5 minutes, which is why that length is the sweet spot for the "X min read" badge.
How your own pace changes the answer
The table assumes an average reader on average material. Three things move your real number:
- Material difficulty. Familiar prose runs fast. Dense technical or academic text drops to 180 to 220 WPM because you reread and pause to process.
- Your purpose. Skimming for the gist can pass 350 WPM with low retention. Close reading for full comprehension runs slower than your average.
- Reading aloud. Spoken delivery averages around 183 WPM, and slows further for presentations where the audience needs time to absorb each point. We cover the speech side in detail in how long it takes to read aloud.
If you want the number for a specific reader, measure rather than assume. There is more on where the averages come from in how many words you can read per minute.
Get the exact time for your text
Paste any text, word count, or page count into our reading time calculator to get reading time, speaking time, and page estimates at once. You can set any pace from 100 to 500 WPM, so the result matches your reader instead of a generic average.
Not sure how many words a passage holds? Run it through the word counter for an exact total first, then drop that number into the calculator. For the rest of the set, from case conversion to text comparison, browse all our text tools.