How reading time is calculated
The formula every publisher uses is the same: minutes = words / words-per-minute, rounded up to a whole number. A 1,350-word article at 225 words per minute is 6.0 minutes, shown as a 6 min read. The only real choice is the speed. Medium famously settled on 265 wpm, many WordPress plugins default to 200, and Ghost uses 275 for text plus an extra 12 seconds for the first image and 6 seconds for later ones. This calculator lets you pick 200, 225, 238 or 250 and shows a comparison table from 175 to 300 so you can see how much the assumption moves the answer.
The best-supported figure comes from Marc Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies: adults reading English non-fiction silently average about 238 words per minute, with fiction a little faster at 260 and reading aloud far slower at 183. Individual speeds vary widely - roughly 175 to 300 wpm covers most adults - and dense technical or legal text pushes nearly everyone below 200. Treat any single number as an estimate, not a promise.
Speaking time is a different number
Saying words out loud is much slower than reading them. A comfortable presentation pace is 130 to 150 words per minute; conversational speech runs about 150 to 160; audiobook narration is usually held between 150 and 160 by publishers; radio and podcast hosts often sit near 160. Auctioneers and fast talkers hit 300 or more, but nobody can follow that for long.
The practical rule for speakers: at 150 wpm you need roughly 150 words per minute of stage time, so a 5-minute lightning talk is about 750 words, a 20-minute conference session about 3,000 words, and a 60-minute keynote around 9,000 - and every one of those should be trimmed by 10-15% to leave room for pauses, slide changes, laughter and questions. A 30-second radio spot is about 75 words. If your script runs long, cutting words is far more reliable than trying to talk faster.
Making the estimate more accurate
A few things the word count alone does not capture. Images, charts and code blocks add time that a pure word-per-minute formula misses - Ghost's 12-second-per-image rule is a reasonable adjustment. Tables and formulas slow readers down more than prose. Readers on phones skim rather than read, so real time-on-page is usually well under the label. And the label counts the whole article, while most visitors never reach the end.
Other useful benchmarks this page reports: average words per sentence (aim for 15-20 in general writing - above 25 and comprehension drops) and average word length, a rough proxy for vocabulary difficulty. Counting rules here match common practice: a word is a run of letters or digits, optionally joined by an apostrophe, hyphen or period, so don't and well-known each count once. Everything is computed in your browser and nothing is uploaded.