Reading Time Calculator

Three different times

People read faster with their eyes than they read aloud, and a live talk runs slower still: it has pauses, slips, and questions from the audience. The gap between silent reading and a voiceover reaches one and a half times, and mixing them up is costly, because talks run over their time slot and videos get re-recorded.

That is why the tool shows four numbers at once: silent reading, reading aloud, a live talk with pauses, and a separate count by characters, the way voiceover studios count.

Reading speed

An adult reads silently at about 150–250 words per minute, and this depends heavily on the text: an instruction manual with numbers is read slower than a story. The slider runs from 100 to 400 words per minute, so you can set your own rate.

For Russian text the default is 180 words per minute, and for Latin script it is 240: Russian words are longer, so at the same speed in words the text takes more time to read. The language is detected by which kind of letters dominates the text.

Images take time too

The reader looks at them, and in a long article that adds up to an extra minute. We count by the rule Medium uses: 12 seconds for the first image and one second less for each next one, but never faster than three seconds.