Reading Time & Speaking Time Calculator

Brysbaert (2019) meta-analyzed 190 studies and found 238 wpm for silent reading of English non-fiction. 175 for fiction, 300+ for skimming. 238 is a good default.

140 is conversational; presentations often slow to 100–130 wpm for emphasis. TED talks average ~155 wpm. Pick the preset that matches your style.

Each CJK ideograph (Chinese hanzi, Japanese kanji/kana, Korean hangul) counts as one 'word' for both reading and speaking — close to the right estimate without needing language-specific tokenizers.

Reading speed correlates with words, not characters. Variation in word length averages out in any reasonable sample.

Because each hangul syllable, kanji and kana counts as one 'word', which is not the unit the wpm figure was measured in. A four-word Korean sentence built from eleven syllable blocks is counted as eleven, so the total runs roughly 2.5-3× high and the time comes out that much too long. Raise the reading speed by the same factor to compensate — if your text averages three syllables per word, set 700 rather than 238 — or time yourself on a hundred syllables once and reuse that number.

A sentence ends at one or more of . ! ? 。 ！ ？, so CJK full stops are handled but a text with no terminal punctuation at all still counts as one sentence rather than zero. Abbreviations inflate the count — 'e.g.' reads as two sentence ends — and a decimal point does the same. Paragraphs are runs separated by a blank line, so a document that uses single line breaks between paragraphs reports one paragraph. Both figures are for orientation, not for a style checker.