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Reading Time Calculator

Reading Time Calculator is part of Toolspire and is ready as soon as this page loads. 238 words is about one minute of silent reading, the figure this site’s word counter also uses. 200 wpm is the round number many blogs still print. 150 wpm is a speaking pace.

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On this page

What you can do here

Three paces, named

238 is silent reading, 200 is the blog convention, 150 is speaking. The headline does not hide which one it used.

Minutes and seconds

A 90-second piece is not shown as 1.5 minutes, which is easy to misread as a minute and a half in the other direction. It is 1 min 30 sec.

The count sits in the detail

You can see how many tokens were divided, which matters when a paste is full of URLs.

The sequence

How to use the Reading Time Calculator

  1. 1

    Paste the text a reader would actually see

    Navigation, captions and a bibliography change the time. Include only what you are timing.

  2. 2

    Use the headline for silent reading

    238 wpm matches the word counter. Use 200 only if you are comparing with a tool that published that round number.

  3. 3

    Use 150 when the text will be spoken

    A script read aloud is slower than a page read silently. The detail’s speaking figure is the one for a voice-over.

Worth knowing

  • Reading Time Calculator on Toolspire: the headline is words ÷ 238, shown as minutes and seconds. 238 words is 1 min 0 sec.
  • 200 wpm is the second figure. The same 238 words take 1 min 11 sec at that slower pace.
  • 150 wpm is labelled as speaking time. 238 words take 1 min 35 sec to say.
  • A word is a run of non-space characters. The word counter on this site is the page for characters, sentences and the research note behind 238.

Why 238 and not a round 200

The word counter on Toolspire cites 238 words per minute as the average silent speed for adults reading non-fiction English, from Brysbaert’s 2019 review. Many “reading time” widgets still divide by 200 or 250 and do not say so. This page prints 238 as the headline and keeps 200 beside it, so a number you saw elsewhere can be compared without pretending the two divisors are the same. Speaking uses 150. None of these is a measure of how hard the text is.

FAQ

Questions about Reading Time Calculator

Where does Reading Time Calculator run?

Reading Time Calculator runs in this tab on Toolspire. What you type or drop in is not sent to us and is not stored on a server.

How long is 238 words?

One minute at 238 wpm, 1 minute 11 seconds at 200 wpm, and 1 minute 35 seconds spoken at 150 wpm.

Why does another site say a different time?

It is probably dividing by 200, 250 or 300. The detail here includes the 200 wpm figure so you can see that gap.

Does this match the word counter?

The 238 pace does. The word counter also counts characters and sentences. This page is only the time.

Are numbers and URLs words?

Yes. Each run of non-space characters counts as one word. A long URL is one word, not the time it takes to read the letters aloud.

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