Text & wordsFree
Free reading time calculator. Paste text to estimate read and speak duration from words-per-minute. Instant word and character counts.
Last updated 14 October 2026
Two divisions. The tool counts the runs of non-whitespace characters in your text, divides that count by a reading speed in words per minute, and divides it again by a speaking speed. Both speeds are yours to change, and both start at a default: 225 words a minute for reading, 150 for speaking.
Everything below is what those two divisions do and do not account for, measured against this page as it is published.
This is the behaviour most likely to catch you out, because it changes your input rather than warning you. Measured:
49 and the box reads 225. Type 0, or a negative number, or clear the box entirely, and it reads 225.99999 and the box reads 1000.Note that those two rules are not symmetrical. Going under the minimum sends you to the default, while going over the maximum sends you to the limit. A reader who assumes both ends clamp to the nearest allowed value will be wrong at the bottom end by 175 words a minute.
The rewrite also happens on every keystroke, not when you finish. That has a practical consequence: you cannot type a speed digit by digit from an empty box. Measured, starting from empty, the moment the box contains 2 it becomes 225, and it is still 225 when it contains 25. Select the whole box and type or paste the number in one go, or use the spinner arrows.
Fractional speeds are allowed. 225.7 stays as typed and is used as typed.
A word is a run of characters with no whitespace in it. That is simple and predictable, and it is not what a person counts. Measured on this page:
state-of-the-art well-known mother-in-law is 3 words, because nothing is split at a hyphen.hello 😀 world is 3 words. An emoji separated by spaces is a word.Because the rule is a rule and not a judgement, two of our own tools can disagree about the same sentence. On It's a well-known café — naïve readers don't notice 2026. this page reports 10 words, and our Word Frequency Counter reports 12, because it strips punctuation before splitting and this one does not.
There is a second disagreement, and it is about speed rather than counting. On the same 1,000 words of text, measured today: this page says 4 min 27 sec, using 225 words a minute. Our Word Counter says 5 min, using 200 words a minute, which it does not let you change. Neither is wrong. They are different assumptions, and if you need the two pages to agree, set this one to 200.
It is low, slightly. The largest review of the evidence, Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies covering more than 18,000 participants, puts average silent reading of non-fiction at 238 words a minute. Against that figure the default here runs about 6% long, so a 10-minute estimate is nearer 9 minutes 30 for an average adult reader. That is close enough for a “5 min read” badge and not close enough for timing a script.
The speaking default of 150 is a different matter, and we would rather say so than dress it up. It is a widely repeated convention, and we could not find a primary study establishing it. Published guidance from presentation and narration sources ranges from roughly 100 to 160 words a minute depending on the kind of delivery. Treat the speaking figure as a starting point you are expected to replace with your own measured pace, which is the main reason the box is editable.
Above an hour, the seconds disappear. Measured on 15,000 words at 225 words a minute: the exact figure is 66.67 minutes, which is 1 hour 6 minutes 40 seconds, and the tool displays “1 hr 6 min”. Under an hour it shows seconds, so the format changes as the estimate grows and up to 59 seconds go missing at the moment it does. The “Read minutes (exact)” row underneath keeps two decimal places and is the one to read if the difference matters.
Below a second, the estimate is rounded up to one. A single word reports “1 sec to read” rather than a fraction, and the exact row shows 0.00. Nothing ever estimates zero.
The character counts are plainer than the word count. Characters includes every space, tab and newline; characters without spaces removes all of them. On 1,000 repetitions of the word “word”, that is 4,999 and 4,000 respectively, the difference being the 999 separators.
Every behaviour and every value on this page was measured against this tool as it is published, in a browser, on 14 October 2026. Where the page says what the tool does not do, that is a statement about this tool, not about reading in general.
Because anything below 50 is replaced with the default of 225 as you type. This also means you cannot build a number digit by digit from an empty box: the moment it contains a single digit under 50 it is rewritten. Select the whole box and type or paste the figure in one movement, or use the spinner arrows.
Not the same way, no, and the difference is worth knowing. Above the maximum the value is reduced to the maximum: 99999 becomes 1000. Below the minimum it is not raised to the minimum, it is replaced with the default: 49 becomes 225, not 50. The speaking box behaves identically around 400 and 150.
It is slightly slow. Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies puts average silent reading of non-fiction at 238 words a minute, so the default here runs about 6% long. Change the box to 238 if you want the estimate to match the research.
It is a common convention and we could not trace it to a primary study, so we are not going to cite one. Published guidance for presentation and narration ranges from roughly 100 to 160 words a minute. Read your own text aloud once against a clock and put your real figure in the box.
Different assumed speeds. On the same 1,000 words this page says 4 min 27 sec at 225 words a minute and Word Counter says 5 min at 200, a figure it does not let you change. Set this page to 200 and the two agree.
Because the format changes above an hour. Under an hour you get minutes and seconds; at an hour and over you get hours and whole minutes only, so up to 59 seconds vanish from the headline. Measured, 15,000 words comes to 1 hr 6 min 40 sec and is shown as “1 hr 6 min”. The “Read minutes (exact)” row keeps two decimals.
No. Only words are counted, so an article heavy with figures, code blocks or tables will take longer to get through than the estimate suggests. Nothing about the difficulty of the text is considered either.
No. The counting runs in your browser, nothing is sent to a server, and nothing is kept after you leave the page. You can paste a draft that is not published yet without it going anywhere.