Reading time estimator
Paste or type any text to see how long it takes to read silently and to read aloud, plus a live word, character, sentence, and paragraph count. Pick a reading speed that matches your audience. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
What this does
Reading time is a simple ratio: the number of words divided by your reading speed. The hard part is honest word counting, which this does the same way a text editor would — runs of non-whitespace, so numbers and hyphenated terms count once.
Silent reading for adults runs roughly 200–250 words per minute, with 230 a common middle estimate; skim-readers go faster, careful or non-native readers slower. Speaking aloud is much slower — around 130 words per minute is a comfortable presentation pace — so a script that reads in two minutes takes well over three to deliver. Use the speaking estimate when you're timing a speech, a voiceover, or a podcast segment, and the reading estimate for the "5 min read" label on an article.