The short version
To measure words per minute reading speed, time yourself reading a passage, then divide the number of words by the minutes taken. Read for three minutes at least, on text you would actually read. The average adult scores about 250 wpm. A speed with no comprehension check is not a reading speed.
What words per minute actually measures
Words per minute is a rate. Words read, divided by time taken. Nothing more.
It is the standard unit because it is easy to calculate and it puts two readers on the same scale. It is a ruler, not a verdict.
What it does not measure is whether you understood anything. A wpm score on its own is the least interesting number in reading. Paired with a comprehension score it becomes the most useful one. Our speed reading guide explains why the pair belongs together and what happens when people chase the first half alone.
Have the benchmarks in your head before you measure. An average adult reads at about 250 words per minute. Children average around 150. Normal reading with full comprehension caps near 300, and the fastest competent adults reach about 550. Those numbers come from the 2016 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, led by Keith Rayner, who spent forty years measuring eye movements in reading and had no course to sell.
They are landmarks, not laws. They tell you which part of the map you are standing in. They do not tell you whether you are reading well.
One reader, five speeds
Before you measure, understand what you are measuring. You do not have a reading speed. You have a set of gears, and you change gear according to the job.
Ronald Carver put numbers on them.
| What you are doing | Rate |
|---|---|
| Memorising the text | about 140 wpm |
| Learning the text | about 200 wpm |
| Normal reading with full comprehension | about 300 wpm |
| Skimming | about 450 wpm |
| Scanning for a target word | about 600 wpm |
Be careful with the bottom two rows, because the industry is not. They are not reading speeds.
The 450 wpm figure came from readers hunting through a sentence for transposed words. The 600 wpm figure came from readers searching a text for one target word. Those are hunting jobs, not reading with comprehension, and Carver never pretended otherwise. Quote them as reading speeds and you are doing what every speed reading advert does.
Carver named the middle row. Rauding: the process by which reading leads to actually understanding what was read. It runs near 300 words per minute. That is the row your book lives in.
How to measure your reading speed by hand
You need a clock, a text and a calculator. That is the entire kit.
The method
Pick a text you would actually read. A page of the novel on your bedside table. An article from a magazine you buy. Not a children’s story, unless you are a child, and not a legal contract, unless you read contracts for a living. The text sets the number as much as your eyes do.
Start the clock and read at your normal pace. Do not push. You are recording where you are, not setting a personal best. Pushing gives you a number you cannot repeat and cannot improve on.
Stop the clock at the end of the passage. Note the time in seconds.
Count the words. Nobody counts every word by hand. Count the words in five full lines, divide by five to get an average line, then multiply by the number of lines you read. It is close enough. If the text is on a screen, paste it into a word processor and let the machine count.
Now divide. Words divided by minutes gives you words per minute. If you read 900 words in three minutes, that is 300 wpm. If you read 900 words in 4 minutes 30, that is 900 divided by 4.5, which is 200 wpm.
Write the answer down with the date and the name of the text beside it.
Read for long enough to mean it
Sixty seconds is not enough. Read for three minutes at least, and five is better.
Short samples flatter you. Anyone can hold a sprint for a minute. The reading speed that matters is the speed you can hold over an hour of study or a chapter of a book, and that only shows up when the sample runs long enough to get boring.
Measure more than once
One number is an anecdote. Three numbers on three different texts start to look like a fact.
Measure on something easy, something normal and something hard. You will get three different scores, and the spread between them tells you more than any single figure. A reader who scores 300 on fiction and 120 on a technical paper does not have a reading speed. They have a range, and the range is the honest answer.
Then check what you kept
This is the step people skip, and skipping it makes the whole exercise worthless.
After you stop the clock, close the book. Write down what the passage said. The main claim, the supporting points, anything that surprised you. If you cannot, your number is not a reading speed. You moved your eyes over the text and the clock ran.
Attention alone shifts the result. A reader who knows a quiz is coming reads differently, and both the speed and the understanding move. Nothing changed but the stakes.
Or let the test do it for you
The manual method works. It is also fiddly, and most people do it once, get a number they like, and never do it again.
Take the speed reading test on our homepage instead. It gives you the text, times you, counts the words, and follows with comprehension questions. You get a wpm score and a comprehension score together, which is the only pair worth having.
It takes a few minutes and it costs nothing. Do it before you spend money on a course, an app or a book.
Then do it again in a month. The second score is where the information is. One score tells you where you stand. Two scores tell you whether anything you did in between was worth the hours you gave it.
If you want the comprehension side pushed harder, our speed reading comprehension test goes deeper on what you retained rather than how fast you moved.
Why your wpm score keeps moving
Readers get annoyed when they measure twice and get two answers. They should not. Two answers is the correct result.
Three things set your speed on any given text: your ability, the difficulty of the text, and your reason for reading it. Only the first belongs to you. The other two change with every page you open.
The medium moves it too. Most readers slow down on a screen compared with paper. So does the room. A quiet chair and a phone left in another room will buy you words per minute that no technique can.
Take the average of a few honest measurements. Do not take the best one. It came on the easiest text, on the morning you were sharpest.
What to do with the number once you have it
A reading speed is a starting point. Here is what it tells you to work on.
If you are near 250 wpm you are average, and part of the ceiling is your inner voice. Most readers pronounce every word in their head, which fires the brain’s speech machinery and holds them near speech pace. That is subvocalization. You can reduce it. You cannot remove it.
If you are below 200, look at comprehension before you look at speed. Between 10 and 15 per cent of a skilled reader’s eye movements go backwards to re-read, and those jumps come from meaning breaking down, not from bad eye habits. They are doing a job. We cover them in reading regressions.
If you want more speed, be careful where you look for it. Your eyes are not the brake. A fixation lasts about 250 milliseconds, the flick between fixations lasts 25 to 30, and the flicks add up to roughly a tenth of your reading time. The other nine tenths is your brain working out what the words mean. A long fixation means the brain stalled, not the eye.
The span is smaller than you have been told, too. The eye resolves letters across about twenty characters, and you can identify a word about seven to eight characters to the right of where you are looking. That is the word you are on plus the next one. Taking in a whole line at a glance is, in Rayner’s words, simply biologically impossible. We set out what is real in visual span.
So the number climbs the slow way. Reading is a psychomotor skill, like touch typing or the piano. Courses that work do it by making the student read a great deal of text over eight to twelve weeks. Reading a lot is the shortcut. The speed reading exercises that work are the boring ones, done often.
Measure first. Take the speed reading test, write both scores down, and come back to them in a month.
Sources
Rayner, K., Schotter, E. R., Masson, M. E. J., Potter, M. C., & Treiman, R. (2016). So Much to Read, So Little Time: How Do We Read, and Can Speed Reading Help? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(1), 4–34.
Carver, R. P. (1992). Reading rate: Theory, research, and practical implications. Journal of Reading, 36(2), 84–95.
