Speech time calculator

A speech of 1,000 words takes 7 minutes and 9 seconds at an average speaking pace of 140 words per minute, the middle setting here. Speaking pace means the number of words a speaker gets through in a minute, and the time is the word count divided by it. At a slow, deliberate 120 words a minute the same text runs to 8 minutes and 20 seconds. At a brisk 170 it shrinks to 5 minutes and 53 seconds. Read aloud at the measured English rate of 190, it lasts 5 minutes and 16 seconds. Read silently at 236, it takes 4 minutes and 14 seconds (Brysbaert, 2019). The word count is the only certain input. The pace is an estimate, which is why the result also shows the time at the slowest and the fastest speaking preset. Pauses for laughter or applause come on top of all these figures.

The word count follows the rule of a word processor: any run of characters between spaces that holds a letter or a digit is one word. A hyphenated compound such as well-known counts once, and a dash standing alone counts as nothing.

About 700 words fit into five minutes at 140 a minute, and between 600 and 850 across the slow and fast presets. The time to words mode runs the sum backwards: minutes times the pace, rounded down so the text stays inside the time.

Converting minutes to words this way gives a target length before a single line is written. With 10 % of the time kept free for pauses, five minutes hold 636 words instead of 700.

Only two of the five paces are measured: reading aloud and silent reading. Both come from a meta-analysis, a study that pools the results of many earlier studies, published by Marc Brysbaert of Ghent University (Brysbaert, 2019).

For English, reading aloud averages 190 words a minute across 27 studies with 3,482 readers. Silent reading averages 236 across 144 studies with 15,409 readers. The headline figures often quoted from the same paper pool every language, so they differ slightly from these English rows.

No study measures the speaking rate of a prepared speech, in English or any other language. The three speech presets are therefore the tool's convention, built on figures Brysbaert cites. 120 words a minute is a rate a reader can keep up aloud all day. 140 sits at the lower end of the pace audiobooks are recorded at. 170 is the pace found ideal for a news bulletin dense with information. The methodology page explains how every figure on the site is checked.

English is the base from which the other languages on this site are scaled. Each one's presets are the English anchors times its measured reading aloud rate against the English 190. German, read aloud at 169, gets an average of 125: longer words mean fewer of them in a minute.

Everyday conversation is another matter. Yuan, Liberman and Cieri (2006) measured American telephone calls at a conversational pace well above the fast preset. The sources here hold no comparable figure for British speech.

The pause allowance adds a percentage on top of the speaking time for everything that is not words. With 10 % allowed, the 1,000 word speech grows from 7 minutes and 9 seconds to 7 minutes and 51 seconds, of which 42 seconds are pauses.

• Deliberate pauses after a key line or before a punchline.
• Audience laughter, which a speaker usually waits out before going on.
• Applause at the start, at the end and sometimes in the middle.
• A sip of water, a turned page or a change of slide.

Nerves work in both directions. Some speakers rush and finish early, while others lose their place and stop. In the time to words mode the allowance acts as a buffer: with 20 % set aside, five minutes hold 583 words at 140 a minute. A silent reader has no audience, so the allowance is hidden for that pace.

Debrett's, the etiquette publisher, puts it at no more than 5 minutes; no rule or law sets a length. At 140 words a minute that comes to about 700 words, or 600 to 850 across the presets. With 10 % kept free for laughter, the figure drops to 636.

Choosing the best man speech as the occasion checks a draft against those 5 minutes. A best man speech of 800 words takes 5 minutes and 43 seconds at the middle preset, so the result shows it over by 43 seconds.

The other wedding speeches have no published length at all. A father of the bride speech, a groom's speech and a maid of honour speech are set by the couple and the running order of the day. A toast is the short closing line with raised glasses, often only a sentence or two.

The Spoken Language endorsement is the speaking assessment of GCSE English Language, set in the same terms by AQA, Eduqas, OCR and Pearson. As a guide, the whole assessment lasts no more than 10 minutes (AQA and others, Spoken Language endorsement).

Those 10 minutes hold 1,400 words of speech at 140 a minute. The assessment also covers questions and feedback after the presentation, though, so the prepared talk takes only part of it. A talk planned at six minutes holds about 840 words.

The same sums apply to a presentation at school, university or work. Slides add their own pauses, which the allowance can cover.

In the House of Commons the Speaker may set a time limit on backbench speeches under Standing Order No. 47. The Hansard Society reports that the usual limits have fallen from 6 to 8 minutes to 4 to 5 minutes (Hansard Society, 2024).

Spoken at 140 a minute, a four minute limit holds 560 words and a five minute limit 700. The same report finds Members speaking more often than before, but for less time on each occasion.

Silent reading is the fastest pace in the tool, at 236 words a minute for English readers on average. A 1,500 word article therefore has a reading time of about 6 minutes and 21 seconds, against 7 minutes and 54 seconds when read aloud.

Speaking every word in full is what holds the aloud rate back. Individual readers spread widely around both averages, and a dense or technical text slows everyone down. When silent reading is chosen, the result is labelled as a reading time and the pause allowance disappears.

A timed rehearsal is the only exact measure of one speaker's pace. The words in the script divided by the minutes on the timer give that speaker's own rate. A 1,000 word script read in eight minutes means 125 words a minute, a figure the own pace option accepts.

The reference cases below rerun known answers through the calculator. One is Brysbaert's own example: the paper's abstract, timed at the pace of a silent reader. The others are worked sums at the English presets.

The estimate leaves out accent, the difficulty of the words, numbers read out in full and ad-libbed lines. Each of them can move the real speaking time away from the figure shown.