Average Reading Speed: How Many Words per Minute Is Normal?

The average adult reads English silently at about 238 words per minute (WPM) for non-fiction and about 260 WPM for fiction. Reading aloud is slower, at about 183 WPM. These figures come from the largest review of the question so far: Marc Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies and 18,573 participants.

If you have seen 300 WPM quoted as the average, that number is older and too high. Brysbaert traces it to early studies that used short, easy passages and university students, and shows that the pooled evidence sits well below it.

Average reading speed in words per minute

The averages apply to adults between 18 and 60 who are reading in their first language and have no reading difficulty. Fiction is faster than non-fiction largely because its words are shorter on average; once word length is taken into account, the two rates line up.

A normal adult reading speed is a range, not a number: roughly 175 to 300 WPM for non-fiction and 200 to 320 WPM for fiction. If you are inside it, you are not a slow reader.

What is a good reading speed?

A good reading speed is one at which you understand what you came for. That sounds like a dodge, but it is how reading rate behaves: the same person slows down for a contract and speeds up for a familiar news story, and both are correct.

As a rough guide, 200 to 300 WPM with good understanding is ordinary, healthy adult reading. In their review of speed reading, Rayner and colleagues (2016) put the normal pace for most readers at 200 to 400 WPM and conclude that doubling or tripling it without losing comprehension is unlikely. Rates far above that range describe skimming, which is a useful skill with a known cost in detail, not faster reading. The evidence is laid out in does speed reading work?

Who reads more slowly than the average?

The meta-analysis identifies three groups whose rates are lower, for different reasons.

• Children and teenagers. Rate climbs steadily through the school years as word recognition becomes automatic (figures below).
• Older adults. Reading rate declines in old age; the 238 and 260 WPM averages cover readers up to 60.
• People reading in a second language. Brysbaert notes that rates below 100 WPM are not unusual for second-language readers. In one study he cites, proficient bilingual readers were 17% slower in their second language than in their first when reading the two halves of the same novel.

Reading speed by grade (oral fluency in children)

The best-known figures for children are not silent reading speeds. They are oral reading fluency norms: the number of words a child reads aloud correctly in one minute from a grade-level passage (words correct per minute, WCPM). Teachers use them to spot pupils who need support. The table gives the 50th-percentile spring scores from Hasbrouck and Tindal's 2017 norms for US schools.

Do not compare these with the adult silent figures: reading aloud is slower than silent reading at every age, and WCPM subtracts errors. For silent reading, the classic data set is Taylor (1965), summarised in Brysbaert's review: about 115 WPM in grade 2, 185 in grade 6 and 250 in grade 12. Those measurements were taken around 1960, and a 2011 replication found lower rates in most grades, so read them as the shape of the curve, not as targets.

Average reading speed in other languages

Words per minute is an awkward unit across languages, because languages package meaning into words differently. Finnish builds long words that each carry a lot; Spanish uses more, shorter words to say the same thing. Brysbaert shows that most of the difference in WPM between languages is predicted by how many words each one needs to express the same message. Readers of different languages take in information at broadly similar rates.

Outside English the estimates rest on a handful of studies each, so treat them as approximate. A second source measured many languages the same way: Trauzettel-Klosinski and Dietz (2012) had 436 native speakers aged 18 to 35 read matched paragraphs aloud in 17 languages. The average across all 17 was 184 WPM. Among the eleven of them listed in Brysbaert's review, the rates run from 228 WPM in English to 161 WPM in Finnish. Those are reading-aloud rates on deliberately simple texts, built for eye clinics, so they are not comparable with the silent figures above.

How to measure your own reading speed

Most online tests give you one short passage and a number. Brysbaert's review found that short tests vary far more than long ones and recommends at least five minutes of reading, ideally on one long text. To get a figure you can trust:

1. Choose a text of 1,500 words or more of the kind you actually read, that you have not seen before. Note its word count (any word processor will tell you).
2. Read it silently at your ordinary pace, with a stopwatch running. Do not race; you are measuring your normal speed, not your best one.
3. Divide the words by the minutes. A 1,500-word article read in 6 minutes 15 seconds is 1,500 ÷ 6.25 = 240 WPM.
4. Check comprehension straight away: write a three-sentence summary without looking back, then compare it with the text. If you missed the main points, the number does not count.
5. Repeat on two more days with different texts and take the average. Record the type of text, because your fiction and non-fiction speeds will differ.

A paced reader gives you a second way to find the same number: set a speed, read, and adjust until you reach the fastest pace at which you still follow nearly everything.

What does realistic improvement look like?

Modest and slow. Reading rate is set mainly by how quickly you recognise words and build meaning, and that improves with vocabulary, background knowledge and the amount you read. A sense of scale: the norms for a widely used college reading test, quoted in Brysbaert's review, show a gain of 16 WPM between the first and fourth year of university, during years of heavy daily reading.

What is worth doing:

• Read more, and more widely. Twenty minutes a day of text slightly above your comfort level builds the vocabulary and knowledge that speed depends on.
• Match speed to purpose. Decide before you start whether you need the detail or the gist. Skimming what only needs skimming saves more time than any drill.
• Practise a steady pace. Five minutes a day with a pacer or an RSVP readerat your measured speed, raised by 25 WPM only while comprehension holds, trains you to keep moving without drifting. Tachi's reader is free and moves in exactly those steps.
• Re-measure every four weeks with the five-step method above, on a similar kind of text. Expect small changes, and be suspicious of large ones: check the summary step.

If reading is slow because it is physically uncomfortable, with blurred text, headaches or words that seem to move, see an optometrist. No amount of practice fixes an uncorrected vision problem. For a full plan built on what the evidence supports, read how to read faster, or see the short answers in the speed reading FAQ.