Where the speed numbers come from, and how far to trust them
Silent reading rate for adults reading ordinary prose in their first language is commonly cited in the region of 200 to 260 words per minute. That range is an average over populations, drawn from studies that differ in how they define reading, what text they used and whether they checked comprehension afterwards. Meta-analyses that pool many such studies tend to land near the lower end for non-fiction, and the honest summary is that the mean sits somewhere around 230 to 240 with a very wide spread on either side.
The spread is the part people skip. A confident reader on familiar material can sustain well past 300. The same reader on an unfamiliar legal clause drops below 150 and rereads. Skimming is not reading and can hit 600 or more while retaining only headings and first sentences. If your audience is homogeneous and you know something about them, adjust the field. If you do not, 240 is a defensible middle and the number is a rough guide rather than a measurement of anything.
Reading aloud is a different measurement entirely
Speaking is bounded by articulation, not by comprehension, and it is much slower. Audiobook narration is typically produced around 150 words per minute, which is also roughly where most people land when reading a prepared text aloud at a comfortable pace. Broadcast news reads faster, closer to 160 to 180, because the copy is written to be read at speed. Teaching, demonstration and anything with numbers in it runs slower.
If you are estimating a talk rather than a narration, the aloud figure here is not the one you want, because it does not account for pauses, slide changes or questions. Use the speech time estimator, which multiplies through a pause allowance.
Setting a "N min read" badge
The badge on an article is not a prediction. It is a signal about commitment, telling a reader roughly how much of their attention the piece is asking for. Round up, because a reader who finishes early feels efficient and a reader who runs over feels misled. A four minute ten second estimate is a five minute read.
Publishing platforms handle images differently. Some add a fixed few seconds per image, some add a decreasing amount for each successive image, and some ignore them. The image fields here use a flat allowance so you can see exactly what is being added rather than inheriting somebody else's undisclosed formula.
What the estimate cannot see
Word count is blind to structure. A thousand words of narrative and a thousand words of dense reference table read at completely different speeds, and no words-per-minute figure fixes that. Code blocks get stared at. Tables get scanned back and forth. Equations stop people entirely. Diagrams cost time that is not in the word count at all, which is what the image allowance is for, imperfectly.
If the timing genuinely matters, the only reliable method is to hand the draft to two or three people who resemble your readers and time them. Everything on this page is a substitute for that, used when that is not practical.
Questions people ask
Why does this tool give a different number from my publishing platform?
Because every platform picks its own words-per-minute constant and its own image rule, and most of them do not publish either. Figures between 200 and 275 wpm are all in circulation, and some platforms count characters rather than words. A twenty percent disagreement between two reading-time estimates on the same article is normal and does not mean either is wrong. Set the speed field here to match your platform if you want the numbers to agree.
Does this work for languages other than English?
Partly. The word counting splits on whitespace, so it works for any language that separates words with spaces, but the default speeds are calibrated for English and would need changing. Languages without word spacing, such as Chinese and Japanese, will register the whole text as a handful of words and the count will be meaningless; those languages are conventionally measured in characters per minute instead.
How is a sentence counted?
By looking for a period, question mark or exclamation mark followed by whitespace or the end of the text, allowing for a closing quote or bracket in between. That means abbreviations such as "e.g." and decimal numbers will inflate the count slightly. The sentence figure is there to give you the average sentence length, which is the more useful of the two, and a few percent of error does not change what that tells you.
Is anything I paste sent anywhere?
No. The page is static and the calculation happens in JavaScript in your browser. There is no request to a server when you type, nothing is stored, and closing the tab discards it. You can confirm this by opening your browser network panel and watching it stay empty while you paste.