Reading time
Paste a text: find out how many minutes it takes to read silently and aloud.
What it's for
It says how long a text takes to read, silently and out loud. Those are two different questions serving two different jobs: whoever writes an article wants «4 min read» at the top, which is the piece of information that decides whether you start; whoever records a video, a podcast or a speech wants to know whether the script fits the time available, before recording it three times.
The two numbers, and where they come from
Silent reading is worked out at 200 words a minute: that's the figure usually used for ordinary prose and an adult reader, and it sits in the middle of the real range, which runs from a little under 200 to about 250. Reading aloud is worked out at 130 words a minute, because the voice is slower than the eye: you breathe, you articulate, you stop at the punctuation.
They are averages, not promises. A technical text full of numbers and proper nouns reads much more slowly, a flowing story much faster, and everyone has their own pace. The number is there to decide («is this too long?»), not to time you.
How the words are counted
A word is a piece of text between two spaces that contains at least one letter or digit: digits, acronyms, «e-mail» and «12:30» count as one word each, while an emoji or a dash on its own doesn't count. An apostrophe before a vowel splits two words (French «l'eau» and Italian «c'è» are two), before a consonant it doesn't («don't» stays one); long dashes separate like spaces, and every Chinese or Japanese character counts as one word.
Seconds are worked out with whole numbers and rounded up: 201 words at 200 a minute make 61 seconds, not 60. The number changes as you type, without pressing anything, so you see the effect of a cut straight away.
The same rule is used by Word counter, Editorial pages, Word frequency and Unique words: the same text gives the same word count on all five pages.
Nearby tools
For the full count of characters, sentences and paragraphs there is Word counter. If the text is too long because it's written in a complicated way, before cutting it it's worth measuring it with How readable is a text, which says which sentences to shorten. Whoever works in cartelle finds that count in Editorial pages, and whoever has to stay within a social network's limit in Social character counter.