Tukuk-OS📖 Reading Time
ℹ️ What this tool does & how it works
Blog widgets set reading time by dividing words by 200 and rounding up; the research says something more specific. Brysbaert’s 2019 synthesis of 190 studies puts the average adult at about 238 words per minute reading silently in English, while reading aloud to someone runs near 150 and a prepared spoken presentation closer to 130 — audiobook narration sits around 160. This page counts words the way a word processor does (trim, then split on whitespace) and prices the same text at every speed, so you can quote the number that matches the claim you are making.
Why published reading times overstate and understate at once
They overstate what a screen reader actually spends — visitors skim, bounce mid-list and scroll past the middle of long paragraphs, so the time on page for a "5-minute" article is routinely half that. And they understate what the same article costs a careful reader: the 238 wpm average is measured on continuous prose without headings, code blocks, tables or links pulling the eye; add any structure and the true linear time stretches, because attention costs are not in the word count. The honest use of a reading time is comparative — "this is twice as long as the last one" — not predictive. If a number must be predictive, the study-speed line (150–160 wpm) is the one that survives when the text contains anything a reader has to think about.