Average Reading Speed: How Many Words Per Minute?
How many words per minute an adult really reads, where the popular “300 words” figure came from, and why speed in words depends on the language.
How many words per minute adults read
In 2019 the psychologist Marc Brysbaert of Ghent University gathered reading speed studies from 1901 to 2019 into a single meta-analysis. He used studies in which adults under 60 read ordinary connected text in their native language to understand it or for pleasure, not to memorize it. The vast majority of the data is for English.
| How people read | Average, words per minute | Range |
|---|---|---|
| Silently, non-fiction | 238 | 175–300 |
| Silently, fiction | 260 | 200–320 |
| Aloud | 183 | not given |
| To memorize and retell | about 100 | noticeably lower in some studies |
The figure for reading aloud comes from 77 studies and 5,965 participants. It’s close to a normal speaking pace, but keeping it up for hours isn’t realistic. Tests used in eye care give similar values: in the international IReST text set, in which adults aged 18–35 read simple paragraphs aloud in 17 languages, the average speed was 184 ± 29 words per minute.
Speed changes with age. It’s lower in children and rises throughout the school years, and in healthy people it usually drops noticeably after 60–65. People read more slowly in a language that isn’t their own: in one study in which Dutch readers read a novel in Dutch and in English, the difference was 17%.
Where “300 words per minute” came from
The “normal 300 words per minute” still turns up in textbooks, reading time calculators and ads for courses. Brysbaert traced where it came from: early experiments on small groups of students and research on eye movements. One often-cited table, for example, had just 10 skilled readers with an average speed of 308 words per minute. Data from hundreds of studies don’t support the figure. Brysbaert concludes that aiming for 300 words per minute is unrealistic for most people and will probably end in disappointment.
He also looked at reading for pleasure: 48 regular readers recorded how long it took them to finish their next book. The average was 260 words per minute, and only 11 of the 48 read faster than 300, even though all of them had studied or were studying at university and two thirds of the books were detective stories, thrillers and fantasy.
What changes your speed: the text and your purpose
- Word length. Brysbaert attributes the gap between fiction and non-fiction mainly to longer words in scientific and business texts. The longer the words, the fewer of them fit into a minute.
- The task. When a text has to be memorized, speed falls to about 100 words per minute, and in some studies students learned a text at about 40–60 words per minute. Their eyes don’t move any slower: people go back and reread more often, linking parts of the text together.
- Scanning. When you search a text for a specific word instead of trying to understand it, your eyes move differently, with longer jumps and shorter stops. This is no longer reading in the usual sense, so its “speed” can’t be compared with reading.
- Your surroundings. The figures from studies come from people who stay focused on the text the whole time. In everyday life your mind wanders and notifications distract you, so Brysbaert estimates your speed is probably lower. In one experiment, participants admitted to thinking about something else during 36% of the sentences in an easy text and 42% in a difficult one.
Reading speed in other languages
Speed in words depends on how many words a language spends on the same idea. English has many short function words, including articles, and other languages can say the same thing in fewer words. In several studies, texts with the same meaning in different languages took about the same time to read. So the amount of meaning matters more than the number of words, and in languages that use fewer words for the same idea, speed in words per minute is lower. You can see this in the languages with enough data, though the link isn’t strict (it’s stronger for reading aloud than for silent reading): each language has only a few studies, and the texts in them differ.
| Language | Silent, words per minute | Aloud, words per minute | Words per 1,000 in English |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | 236 | 190 | 1,000 |
| Spanish | 278 | 191 | 1,025 |
| French | 214 | 180 | 1,062 |
| German | 260 | 169 | 975 |
| Arabic | 181 | 142 | 822 |
| Finnish | 195 | 162 | 764 |
| Korean | 226 | 133 | 692 |
How much people differ
An average says little about any one person. Differences between people are large and stable: give the same person two long texts and their speed on the two will almost match (in one study the correlation was 0.95 for two texts of 7,300 words each). At the same time, there is little evidence that a difference in speed by itself makes comprehension better or worse.
You also can’t get several times faster without losing comprehension. The review by Rayner and colleagues (2016) concludes that doubling or tripling your speed, for example from 250 to 500–750 words per minute, while understanding a text just as well is unlikely. According to the authors, what helps you read faster without losing comprehension is reading practice and command of the language, such as a rich vocabulary. There’s more in “Does Speed Reading Work?”.
How to find your own speed
- Read for longer than a minute. Brysbaert noticed that short measurements vary much more, and he advises reading for at least 5 minutes, preferably one long text rather than several short ones.
- Pick a book you’d normally read and go at your own pace, without trying to set a record.
- Count words the same way every time: either with prepositions and conjunctions or without them.
- Compare yourself with yourself. Your number doesn’t have to match the 238: language, genre and mood can shift it by tens of words.
For a quick estimate without the app, take the online reading speed test.
Faster or slower than average? Find out in a minute
Read your paper book with the SpeedReading timer, then photograph the page. The app counts the words and shows your speed, and the chart in your history shows how it changes.
Sources
- Brysbaert M. How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 2019, vol. 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047.
- Trauzettel-Klosinski S., Dietz K. Standardized assessment of reading performance: the new International Reading Speed Texts IReST. Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, 2012, vol. 53, no. 9, pp. 5452–5461. PubMed, doi:10.1167/iovs.11-8284.
- Rayner K., Schotter E. R., Masson M. E. J., Potter M. C., Treiman R. So Much to Read, So Little Time: How Do We Read, and Can Speed Reading Help? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2016, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 4–34. PubMed, doi:10.1177/1529100615623267.