ReadingRate · Reading speed test · Reading time calculator
Reading speed test
Read a passage from a classic novel at your usual pace, answer three questions about it, and see how many words a minute you read.
Choose a passage
- Pride and Prejudice · Jane Austen · 1813 · 233 words
- Wuthering Heights · Emily Brontë · 1847 · 329 words
- Great Expectations · Charles Dickens · 1861 · 407 words
The clock starts when the passage appears and stops when you say you have finished. Read it as you would read a novel, not as fast as you can.
These books at your speed
Timed with each book’s ReadingRate difficulty score, because a hard book slows any reader down.
| Book | At 250 wpm |
|---|---|
| The Old Man and the Sea · Ernest Hemingway · 26,694 words | 1 h 40 min |
| The Great Gatsby · F. Scott Fitzgerald · 50,582 words | 3 h 26 min |
| 1984 · George Orwell · 99,751 words | 6 h 30 min |
| Wuthering Heights · Emily Brontë · 115,911 words | 14 h |
| Pride and Prejudice · Jane Austen · 127,015 words | 8 h 38 min |
| Ulysses · James Joyce · 267,886 words | 47 h |
| Middlemarch · George Eliot · 312,432 words | 22 h |
| War and Peace · Leo Tolstoy · 562,135 words | 39 h |
Questions about reading speed
What is the average reading speed?
The average adult reads about 238 words a minute silently in English for non-fiction and 260 for fiction, according to a 2019 review of 190 studies and 18,573 readers by Marc Brysbaert. Most adults read non-fiction at 175 to 300 words a minute and fiction at 200 to 320. Reading aloud averages 183.
How long does it take to read 300 pages?
About 5 hours at 250 words a minute, for pages of 250 words each: 300 pages are about 75,000 words. A harder book takes longer at the same speed, which is why ReadingRate times each book with its difficulty score.
How does this test measure reading speed?
You read a passage of known length while the page times you, then answer three questions about it. The words divided by the minutes are your speed. It counts only with two right answers, so skimming does not make you faster.
How can I read faster?
Read more, and read the kind of book you want to get faster at. Speed comes with vocabulary and familiarity with the text. Methods that promise several times the speed by skipping words trade understanding for pace, as Keith Rayner and colleagues found in their 2016 review, So Much to Read, So Little Time.
Why does ReadingRate assume 250 words a minute?
250 sits between the averages for fiction (260) and non-fiction (238), and every book page on ReadingRate uses it for a book of average difficulty. Your own speed, from this test or from the pages you log, replaces it.
Source: Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047.