How Is Reading Time Calculated?

Reading time is the word count divided by a reading speed in words per minute, rounded up to a whole minute. The Reading Time Calculator counts the words in whatever you paste and divides by three speeds: 200 words per minute for a slower reader, 238 for an average one and 265 for a faster one. A 1,200-word article therefore shows as a 6 minute read at the average speed, with a range of 5 to 6 minutes.

That is all a "5 min read" label is. This guide shows the arithmetic on real text, explains why the rounding sometimes surprises people, and lists what a word count cannot see.

Where the three speeds come from

The middle figure, 238 words per minute, matches the average that a 2019 review of reading-rate research by the psychologist Marc Brysbaert reported for adults reading English non-fiction silently. Reading speed varies a great deal from person to person and from text to text, so the calculator does not pretend there is one right answer. It shows 200 and 265 words per minute either side of the average as a plain range for slower and faster readers. Those two figures are working assumptions, not measurements of your readers.

The arithmetic, shown on texts of different lengths

Each row below is the calculator's output for a text of exactly that many words. Minutes are always rounded up, so anything over a whole minute counts as the next one.

Words	At 265 wpm	At 238 wpm (shown as the read time)	At 200 wpm
238	1 min	1 min	2 min
239	1 min	2 min	2 min
600	3 min	3 min	3 min
1,000	4 min	5 min	5 min
1,200	5 min	6 min	6 min
1,500	6 min	7 min	8 min
2,500	10 min	11 min	13 min

The first two rows show the rounding at work. At 238 words, the average reader needs exactly one minute. Add one word and the label becomes "2 min read", even though the extra time is a fraction of a second. That is a consequence of rounding up, not an error: a label that said "1 min" for 239 words would be slightly short for every reader at that speed. If you publish reading times, expect them to jump by a minute at these boundaries.

Real articles, measured

To see how the labels look on finished writing, here are three articles from this site, with the article text (headings and table cells included) pasted into the calculator:

Article	Words counted	Read time (238 wpm)	Range shown
Do power words make a headline better?	1,599	7 min	7 to 8 min
Title case or sentence case for headlines?	1,389	6 min	6 to 7 min
AP title case: which small words stay lowercase?	1,388	6 min	6 to 7 min

The first row shows the rounding again: 1,599 words at 265 words per minute is a fraction over six minutes, so the fast end of the range is 7, the same as the average. The range is honest about what it is, a rounded estimate in both directions.

A short paragraph works the same way. An 89-word introduction about title tags comes out at 1 minute at every speed, because anything above zero rounds up to at least one minute. For text that short, a reading-time label tells the reader very little; the word count is more useful.

What counts as a word

The calculator counts runs of letters and digits, keeping an apostrophe or hyphen inside a word as part of it. In practice:

• "don't" and "step-by-step" each count as one word.
• "SEO's 600-px limit" counts as three words.
• A decimal such as "0.22" counts as two words, because the full stop splits it.
• Abbreviations with full stops split too: "e.g. this" counts as three words and "U.S. sales" as three.
• Letters outside the basic Latin alphabet break a word apart: "café crème" counts as three words.

For ordinary English prose these quirks barely move the total. For text full of figures, abbreviations or accented names, the count runs a little high, and the reading time with it.

What a reading-time estimate cannot see

A word count treats every word as equal and every page as continuous prose. Real pages are not like that, and the calculator has no way to know:

• Images, charts and video. A diagram a reader studies for a minute adds nothing to the word count. Some sites add a fixed number of seconds per image; this calculator does not, because it only sees the text you paste.
• Tables. Table cells are counted as words, but people scan tables rather than read them line by line, so a table-heavy page usually reads faster than its count suggests, unless the reader is comparing figures carefully, in which case it reads slower.
• Code, formulas and data. Readers slow right down for these. Pasting a code sample in will add to the count but not by the time it really takes.
• Difficulty. Dense technical writing takes longer than a conversational post of the same length. The calculator's readability scores give a rough sense of difficulty, explained in Flesch reading ease and grade level, explained, but they do not change the reading time.
• Skimming. Many readers do not read every word of a web page. A reading time describes reading the whole text, not how long a visit lasts.
• Other languages. The speeds are for English. Average rates differ by language, and the word counter splits words at accented letters, so the estimate is not reliable for text that is not in English.
• Your audience. Readers using a screen reader, reading in a second language or reading on a small phone may be well outside the 200 to 265 range.

Should you show a reading time on posts?

That is an editorial choice; there is no reliable evidence that a reading-time label raises or lowers how much of an article people read, and this site makes no claim either way. Where it helps is in setting expectations: a reader on a phone may want to know whether an article is a two-minute answer or a fifteen-minute guide before starting.

If you do show one, a few habits keep it honest:

1. Count the article text only, not the navigation, footer, comments or related-post links around it.
2. Use one speed across the site so labels are comparable from post to post.
3. Recalculate when you edit; a label left over from a shorter draft is wrong.
4. For pages built around a tool, a table or a video, consider leaving the label off rather than giving a figure that does not describe the visit.

Using the calculator for more than a label

Reading time is also a quick editing check. Paste a draft into the calculator to see whether it is drifting past the length you planned; paste the opening section on its own to see how long a reader spends before reaching the answer. If your introduction is a two-minute read and the question is answered in the third section, that is worth fixing whatever label you show. The same box gives the average words per sentence and the readability scores, which are often the more useful numbers when you are editing.