Average Reading Speed: How Many Words per Minute Does a Person Read?

What is the average reading speed, and how many words per minute does a person actually read? The best available answer: the average adult silently reads about 238 words per minute for non-fiction and about 260 words per minute for fiction. That comes from a meta-analysis of 190 studies covering 18,573 participants (Brysbaert, 2019). Reading aloud is markedly slower, around 183 words per minute on average. In this article you'll find the research numbers, a comparison table, reading speeds by age and by language, a converter from words per minute to pages and hours, and a simple way to measure your own pace reliably.

Average reading speed: the key numbers

The average is one thing; the spread is wide. According to the same meta-analysis, most adults fall between roughly 175 and 300 words per minutewhen silently reading text of average difficulty. A result below 175 doesn't signal a problem — pace depends on language, text difficulty and reading purpose. Results reaching 400–500 words per minute do occur among highly practiced readers, but almost always on easy texts with shallower processing.

Three reference points worth remembering: 183 (reading aloud), 238 (silent reading of non-fiction) and 260 (silent reading of fiction). These figures come from English; the section on other languages below shows how they translate, because identical skill produces different wpm numbers depending on how many words a language needs to say the same thing.

Why you still see 300 words per minute everywhere

Many textbooks and websites quote 300 wpm as the normal adult reading speed. Brysbaert traces that figure to early eye-movement research from the 1920s, to a 1965 survey in which selected college students averaged 280 wpm, and to Ronald Carver's theory that 300 wpm is the optimal rate for both reading and listening. When all available studies are pooled, the mean is 238 wpm, the median 235, and the standard deviation about 51 wpm. A typical adult therefore reads roughly 20% slower than the popular figure suggests. In Brysbaert's own study of people reading fiction books at home, only 11 of 48 regular readers exceeded 300 wpm.

What different speeds mean in practice

• Under 150 wpm. Typical for early readers, for adults reading in a second language and for anyone studying dense material. Not a problem in itself as long as comprehension is high.
• 150 to 200 wpm. The lower part of the adult range. Common with technical or unfamiliar texts, and roughly the pace of reading aloud.
• 200 to 300 wpm. Where most adults land when reading silently with full comprehension. 238 wpm is the research average and 250 wpm is a sensible everyday benchmark.
• 300 to 400 wpm. Above average. Practiced readers reach it on easy, familiar material; only about one in four regular book readers goes beyond 300 wpm.
• 400 to 600 wpm. Fast reading that already involves skipping words. Comprehension of details usually starts to drop here.
• Above 600 wpm. Skimming or scanning rather than reading in the full sense. Claims of 1,000 wpm with normal comprehension contradict the eye-tracking data on fixations and perceptual span described below.

Table: how you compare

The proofreader row illustrates the most important principle: reading speed is a function of purpose. A skilled reader doesn't always read fast — they read at a pace matched to the task. Psychologist Ronald Carver described this as reading "gears": from scanning (600+ wpm), through normal reading, down to studying (~200) and memorizing (~140).

Average reading speed out loud

Reading aloud is limited by how fast you can articulate, not by how fast you can recognise words. Across 77 studies with 5,965 participants the average oral reading rate is 183 words per minute (Brysbaert, 2019), close to typical conversational speech. The English-only subset averages 190 wpm. Audiobook narrators deliberately slow down to 150 to 160 wpm, because that is the most comfortable pace for listeners.

For children, reading aloud is the standard way schools measure fluency, counted in words read correctly per minute. The widely used norms of Hasbrouck and Tindal (2017) put the median US pupil at about 60 words per minute at the end of grade 1, 100 in grade 2, 112 in grade 3, 133 in grade 4 and about 146 in grades 5 and 6. Adult oral rates are reached during secondary school.

Average reading speed by age

Silent reading speed climbs steadily through school, plateaus in adulthood and declines only late in life. The classic developmental data come from Taylor (1965), who tested more than 12,000 US readers from grade 1 to college, keeping only those who passed a comprehension check:

Two caveats. A replication with 2,203 pupils (Spichtig et al., 2016) found noticeably lower rates than in 1965 for every grade except grade 2, and the college figure comes from a selected group, which is one reason the adult average across all studies is 238 rather than 280. After the age of 60 to 65 silent reading slows down even in healthy adults, mainly because fixations get longer and the eyes skip fewer words (Brysbaert, 2019). Reading aloud starts to slow a little earlier.

Average reading speed in other languages

Words per minute are not directly comparable across languages, because languages pack different amounts of information into a word. The meta-analysis gives these rates for native adult readers, together with how many words each language needs to translate 1,000 English words:

The pattern is consistent: languages that need fewer words to say the same thing (Finnish, Hebrew, Korean, Arabic) are read at lower wpm, because readers process information, not words. The samples behind the non-English rows are small and use different texts, so treat them as approximate. When native speakers of 17 languages read the same standardised text, English came out at 228 wpm and German at 179 (Trauzettel-Klosinski & Dietz, 2012), which is why our German norm is set at about 185 rather than the 260 pooled from mixed studies. The practical rule is simple: compare your result only with norms for the language you tested in, which is why our speed test uses separate norms per language.

From words per minute to pages, hours and books

At 238 wpm you read about 14,300 words an hour. A paperback page holds roughly 250 to 300 words, so an average adult turns a page every 60 to 75 seconds, around 50 pages an hour. This is how long common texts take at different speeds:

Real-world times run longer, because these rates assume you stay on task the whole time; Brysbaert notes that everyday reading is slower due to mind wandering and interruptions. Fiction, on the other hand, is usually read a little faster than non-fiction (260 vs 238 wpm), which brings the novel estimate down to just under six hours.

What your eyes do while reading — eye-tracking data

Subjectively, reading feels like a smooth glide along the line. Eye-tracking cameras show something different: the eyes move in jumps. A stop, called a fixation, lasts on average 200–250 milliseconds — and only then do you actually take in text. Between fixations comes a saccade, a rapid 7–9 character jump lasting 20–40 ms during which vision is effectively suppressed (Rayner, 1998).

Then there are regressions— the eyes returning to earlier parts of the text, which make up 10–15% of all saccades in skilled readers. Counterintuitively, they aren't pure waste: when readers are prevented from looking back, comprehension drops (Schotter, Tran & Rayner, 2014).

There's one more hard constraint: the perceptual span. During a single fixation you can identify letters roughly 3–4 characters to the left and 14–15 characters to the right of the fixation point (McConkie & Rayner, 1975). Beyond that, the image is too blurry to identify words. That's why promises of "reading whole pages at a glance" contradict physiology — more on that in our article on speed reading myths and facts.

What determines your reading speed

• Vocabulary and knowledge. Familiar words are recognized in a single fixation; rare ones require longer stops and re-reads. This is the single strongest factor separating readers.
• Text difficulty. The same reader can do 300 wpm on a feature article and 150 on a loan agreement.
• Reading purpose. Hunting for a specific fact, reading for pleasure and studying for an exam are three different speeds.
• Attention habits.Distraction multiplies involuntary regressions — you re-read the same sentence a third time not because it's hard, but because your mind wandered.
• Language and script.Words-per-minute numbers don't transfer 1:1 between languages — compare yourself with others within the same language.
• Reading in a second language.Even proficient bilinguals read a novel about 17% more slowly in their second language (Cop, Drieghe & Duyck, 2015), and learners often stay below 100 wpm until they have met the vocabulary often enough to recognise words automatically.

How to measure your pace reliably

A single measurement says little. For a trustworthy result you need three things: a text of average difficulty (400–600 words), timing yourself without racing for show, and — crucially — checking comprehension afterwards. Speed without understanding is just page-turning. Ideally repeat the measurement on 2–3 different texts and average the results.

That is exactly how our free reading speed test works: it times you on a short passage, checks comprehension with four questions, and shows your effective score against research averages. It takes about two minutes and requires no account.

In Spebleyou can check this from the other direction: upload your own text or an EPUB book and set the guiding pace in words per minute. The speed at which you read comfortably and understand everything is your real result — and along the way you'll notice how quickly your eyes adapt to higher values. You can also see how you do on visual drills in the training section. And if after that check you decide you want to speed up, start with our 30-day training plan — with realistic expectations.

Sources

• 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. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
• Rayner, K. (1998). Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. Psychological Bulletin, 124(3), 372–422. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.124.3.372
• Schotter, E. R., Tran, R., & Rayner, K. (2014). Don't believe what you read (only once): Comprehension is supported by regressions during reading. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1218–1226. doi:10.1177/0956797614531148
• McConkie, G. W., & Rayner, K. (1975). The span of the effective stimulus during a fixation in reading. Perception & Psychophysics, 17, 578–586. doi:10.3758/BF03203972
• Carver, R. P. (1992). Reading rate: Theory, research, and practical implications. Journal of Reading, 36(2), 84–95.
• Taylor, S. E. (1965). Eye movements in reading: Facts and fallacies. American Educational Research Journal, 2(4), 187–202. doi:10.3102/00028312002004187
• Spichtig, A. N., Hiebert, E. H., Vorstius, C., Pascoe, J. P., Pearson, P. D., & Radach, R. (2016). The decline of comprehension-based silent reading efficiency in the United States: A comparison of current data with performance in 1960. Reading Research Quarterly, 51(2), 239–259. doi:10.1002/rrq.137
• Hasbrouck, J., & Tindal, G. (2017). An update to compiled ORF norms (Technical Report No. 1702). Behavioral Research and Teaching, University of Oregon. readingrockets.org
• Cop, U., Drieghe, D., & Duyck, W. (2015). Eye movement patterns in natural reading: A comparison of monolingual and bilingual reading of a novel. PLoS ONE, 10(8), e0134008. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0134008
• Trauzettel-Klosinski, S., & Dietz, K. (2012). Standardized assessment of reading performance: The new International Reading Speed Texts IReST. Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, 53(9), 5452–5461. doi:10.1167/iovs.11-8284