Words to minutes

How to use the calculator

Under Start from, choose Word count, Paste text or Minutes to words. Type your word count, paste your script (it’s counted in your browser and never sent), or set Speaking time in minutes. Then pick a pace from the Pace list, or choose Custom pace and enter your own. The result gives the time or the word count at that pace, the range across audiobook narration speeds, and a table of common speech lengths.

How the time is worked out

Speaking time is the word count divided by your pace in words a minute. The reverse is minutes times words a minute. With the defaults, 1,000 words at 160 words a minute is 6.25 minutes, or 6 minutes 15 seconds. Five minutes at the same pace is 800 words.

Here is the same arithmetic for the speech lengths people ask about most:

Speech length	140 wpm	160 wpm	180 wpm	183 wpm (reading aloud)
1 minute	140	160	180	183
3 minutes	420	480	540	549
5 minutes	700	800	900	915
10 minutes	1,400	1,600	1,800	1,830
20 minutes	2,800	3,200	3,600	3,660

Where the paces come from

Every preset in the list is a published figure or the middle of a published range:

• Audiobook narration, 140 to 180 words a minute. Brysbaert’s 2019 review of reading rates reports this range from earlier studies of spoken English; it isn’t his own measurement. The calculator offers both ends and 160, the middle, as the default.
• Reading aloud, 183 words a minute. The same review averaged 77 studies with 5,965 participants reading text out loud. It’s the closest measured figure for a speech you read word for word from a script.
• Phone conversation, 160 to 200 words a minute. Yuan, Liberman and Cieri (2006) measured American English speakers in 2,438 recorded phone conversations, mostly between strangers. The rate depended on how pauses were counted, and older speakers talked more slowly. The calculator offers 200, the fast end, for people who talk quickly.

A phone call isn’t a presentation, and an audiobook narrator has a script and a booth. None of these figures measures people giving a talk, so treat them as reference points around your own pace.

Why there’s no 130 or 150 words a minute preset

Our own old calculator on usescroll.app used 130 words a minute with no source behind it. When we checked on October 17, 2026, we couldn’t trace a single average speaking rate for talks to a primary study, so this version sticks to figures we could read in the papers themselves and lets you set your own.

Planning a talk with a time limit

Work backward from the limit. If you have 5 minutes and speak at about 160 words a minute, a script of around 800 words fills the time with nothing to spare. Pauses for slides, laughter, questions and breath all come out of the same 5 minutes, so a script a little under the full count leaves room for them. Rehearse once with a timer before the real thing; it’s the only number that includes your own pauses.

The same table works for video scripts, voice notes and podcast segments. For text people will read rather than hear, use the reading time calculator; silent reading runs at about 238 words a minute for nonfiction, faster than any of the speaking paces here.

What the result doesn’t tell you

The calculator counts words, not the time between them. It can’t see slides, demos, applause or the questions you’ll take, and it assumes one steady pace from start to finish. The paces were measured in English; for other languages, time yourself and use a custom pace. Pasted Chinese, Japanese or Korean text gets a note instead of a time, because a space-based word count doesn’t work for it.