Reading time calculator

Word count divided by reading speed. The average speed is 238 words per minute, the silent-reading average for non-fiction from Marc Brysbaert's 2019 review of 190 reading studies. Skim assumes 400 wpm (fast reading where you skip some detail) and Careful assumes 150 wpm (dense or technical material, or reading to remember). Speaking time uses 150 wpm, a typical pace for talks, podcasts, and voiceovers.

Anything separated by spaces that contains at least one letter or number counts as a word, so hyphenated words count once and stray dashes or bullets don't count at all. Chinese and Japanese don't put spaces between words, so each Chinese character, Hiragana, or Katakana counts as one word instead. Published reading rates for those languages (roughly 250 to 350 characters per minute) land close to the English average, so the same speeds still give a fair estimate. Korean uses spaces, so it's counted like English.

A sentence ends at a period, question mark, exclamation point, or ellipsis followed by a space, or at a Chinese or Japanese full stop. Abbreviations like "Dr." can add an extra sentence now and then. Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line. If your text has no blank lines at all, every non-empty line counts as a paragraph.

The page is fetched by a server, the same way a link preview bot sees it. Paywalled articles, pages behind a login, and sites that build their content with JavaScript after the page loads often send little or no article text to servers. Some sites block bots outright. If the count looks low, open the page in your browser, copy the article, and use the Paste text tab instead.

Just the article. The extractor uses Mozilla's Readability (the engine behind Firefox Reader View) to drop navigation, ads, sidebars, comments, and footers. You can copy the result or download it as plain text or as Markdown with headings, links, and images kept.

Pasted text never leaves your browser. All the counting happens on your device. For URLs, a Stashr server fetches the public page, extracts the article, and sends it back to you. Nothing is stored, and private or local network addresses are blocked.