Reading speed test
Read a short passage at your usual pace and answer four questions. The test shows how many words per minute you read and how well you understood the text. No sign-up, and your result isn’t sent anywhere.
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Passage
Questions about the passage
Your result
0 words per minute
Correct answers: .
Adult averages: 260 words per minute for fiction (typically 200–320) and 238 for non-fiction (typically 175–300).
Every morning the lighthouse keeper on Long Island wrote the same things in his log: the wind, the waves, how much kerosene was left. Over forty-six years the logs had filled a whole cupboard, and nobody but him had ever read them. So when a girl of about twelve came over on the mail boat in early October and asked if she could see the entries for one old August, Arkady Petrovich didn’t know what to say.
“What do you want them for?” he asked, pouring the tea.
The girl took an old photograph out of her backpack. It showed a young man in a sweater standing on this very pier, holding up a huge fish by the gills. On the back, someone had written in pencil: “Long Island, August, storm for three days.”
“That’s my grandfather,” she said. “Grandma says he got stuck here for three days on his way to propose to her. She still doesn’t believe it was the storm. She thinks he just got scared.”
Arkady Petrovich grunted, took the right volume down from the shelf and spent a long time turning its yellowed pages. August had started quietly that year. For two weeks the log said the same thing: calm, fog, calm. Then he found an entry in his own hand: “The seventeenth. North wind, waves four meters. Boat did not come. A guest on the island, very nervous, keeps looking at his watch.” Two more entries just like it followed, for the eighteenth and the nineteenth.
The girl took pictures of the pages with her phone and suddenly laughed. Under the nineteenth, in tiny handwriting, was a note: “The guest bought a fish from me to have his picture taken with it on the pier. Asked me not to tell anyone.”
“So he didn’t catch it?” she asked.
“I can confirm the storm,” said the keeper. “But not a word to your grandmother about the fish.”
That evening the boat took her back. The next morning Arkady Petrovich wrote down the wind, the waves and the kerosene, thought for a moment, and added a line that had never been there before: “It turns out somebody reads these.”
It feels as if your eyes glide smoothly along a line of text. In fact, they move in jumps. They stop on a word for about a quarter of a second, leap forward, stop again, and carry on like this to the end of the line. Scientists call the stops fixations and the jumps saccades.
We take in text only during the stops. While the eye is flying toward the next word, vision can hardly make anything out, although we don’t notice: the brain stitches the separate snapshots into one continuous picture. Only a tiny area at the center of your gaze stays sharp. It covers just a few letters, and the words around it get blurrier and blurrier. That is why you can’t take in a whole page at a glance, whatever some course ads may promise.
In one jump the eye usually covers seven to nine letters. The step isn’t constant: the gaze often skips short function words such as “of” and “the”, and it lingers on long or rare ones. A hard text slows you down not because your eye muscles get tired, but because the brain needs more time to recognize and understand the words.
In skilled readers, roughly one jump in ten goes backward. These returns are called regressions. For a long time they were seen as a bad habit, and speed reading courses tried to train them away. But research shows that many regressions are useful: they let readers fix something they misunderstood. In one experiment, words were hidden as soon as the reader’s gaze moved past them, so going back was impossible. Comprehension of the sentences got worse.
Here is the main takeaway. Reading speed is limited not by the eyes but by language: by how quickly we recognize words and connect their meanings. That’s why eye muscle exercises do little, while ordinary practice helps. The more people read, the more words they know and the faster they recognize them, so the gaze spends less time on each one.
What is a normal reading speed?
The most reliable figures come from a meta-analysis by Marc Brysbaert covering 190 studies and 18,573 participants, mostly in English.
| How people read | Average, words per minute | Typical range |
|---|---|---|
| Silently, non-fiction | 238 | 175–300 |
| Silently, fiction | 260 | 200–320 |
| Aloud | 183 | — |
The often-quoted “300 words per minute” isn’t supported by these data. Brysbaert traces it to early experiments on small groups of students and concludes that it’s an unrealistic goal for most people. More in average reading speed.
How your result is calculated
We divide the number of words in the passage by your reading time in minutes. Words are counted the same way as in our word counter. Time when the tab was hidden doesn’t count. The questions don’t change your speed, but they show whether to trust it: skimming fast and remembering nothing is easy.
Why this test is only an estimate
Short measurements vary a lot. Brysbaert recommends reading for at least 5 minutes, and one long text rather than several short ones. Genre, screen and mood all shift the result, so compare yourself with yourself, not with someone else’s number.
More accurate with your own paper book
Read with the SpeedReading timer, then photograph the page. The app counts the words, shows your speed and keeps it in your history so you can see the changes.
Does speed reading work?
A review by Rayner and colleagues (2016) concludes that doubling or tripling your reading speed while understanding a text just as well is unlikely. There is a trade-off between speed and accuracy, and what helps you read faster without losing comprehension is reading practice and language skill, such as a richer vocabulary. See does speed reading work? for the details.
Questions
Can I take the test twice?
Yes, but with the other passage. If you reread the same one, your result will be inflated because you already know the content.
Is the test suitable for a child?
The passages are written for adults, so a child’s result can’t be compared with these averages.
Is my result saved?
No. It’s calculated in your browser and disappears when you close the page. The app keeps your measurement history on your phone.
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.
- 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. doi:10.1177/1529100615623267.