Text: 307 words
Questions: 3, multiple choice
Time: About 3 minutes

Reading speed test

Read a short text at your usual pace, press Stop, and answer three questions. You get your words per minute and how much you understood, shown against typical adult reading speeds.

How it goes

Press Start. The text appears and the clock starts.
Read at your usual pace, the way you read a book. Don't skim.
Press Stop after the last line, then answer three questions without looking back.

Nothing is sent anywhere: the result is worked out in this browser.

Read it the way you read a book

A short story about a small-town library, 307 words. It stays hidden until you press Start, so the clock measures your reading and not a first glance.

The clock is running

The library that walked

For forty years the library in our town stood on the corner of the market square, in a narrow brick house with a green door. People loved it, but the building had a problem that no repair could fix: its floors were too weak. Every winter the librarian measured the cracks in the reading room, and every winter they were a little longer. In the end an engineer said the shelves could not stay. The books had to go.

The town found them a new home in the old school on the hill, which had stood empty since the children moved to a bigger school by the river. The rooms were bright and the floors were solid stone. Only one question was left: how to move almost twelve thousand books with no money for a moving company.

The first plan was a borrowed van. It took about six hundred books at a time, and when the road was wet it could not climb the steep street to the school. After two trips the driver gave up.

The answer came from a nine-year-old girl who had come in to return a book. Why not pass them, she asked, from hand to hand? On a Saturday morning more than three hundred people stood in a line from the green door all the way up to the school. Each book travelled the whole distance without once touching the ground, and volunteers at the top put them on the shelves in the same order in which they had left.

It took two days. On Sunday evening the last book, a worn atlas, reached the end of the line, and the girl who had the idea carried it inside herself.

The brick house on the square is a bakery now. The green door is still there.

Scripts are off in this browser, so the clock and the questions are not available. You can still time yourself: the text has 307 words; divide them by the minutes it took you.

Your result

Reading speed

0wpm

You

200–300: the range usually quoted
238 and 260: average adult speed, non-fiction and fiction

Comprehension

0 of 3 answers right

The averages are for adults reading English silently, from a 2019 meta-analysis by Marc Brysbaert. In other languages the number of words per minute differs, partly because words are longer or shorter.

Read at your pace in Freadly

Freadly has a calibration test like this one built in. It shows a book one word at a time at the pace you choose, and the Stats tab plots your reading pace against your calibration.

Sources

Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047.
Rayner, K., Schotter, E. R., Masson, M. E. J., Potter, M. C., & Treiman, R. (2016). So much to read, so little time: How do we read, and can speed reading help? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(1), 4–34.

How the reading speed test works

The clock starts when you press Start and stops when you press Stop. Your speed is the number of words in the text divided by the time, in words per minute (wpm), rounded to the nearest ten, the same way Freadly's own calibration test rounds it.

Speed alone says little, so three questions follow. They ask about the plain facts of the story, nothing you would have to remember word for word. A fast time with wrong answers usually means skimming rather than reading.

One short text is a rough measure. A second run on the same text will be faster because you already know it, so your first result is the honest one. For a steadier figure, time yourself on a few pages of an ordinary book on different days.

What is a good reading speed?

The most careful estimate I know of comes from a 2019 meta-analysis by the psychologist Marc Brysbaert, which pooled many studies of adults reading English silently. The averages came out at about 238 words per minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. The range of 200 to 300 wpm that is often quoted online is in line with it.

Those are averages, so plenty of good readers sit well below or above them. The number moves with:

the text: a textbook chapter is slower than a novel;
the purpose: reading to remember is slower than reading to find out what happens;
the language: in a second language, or one you read less often, expect a lower figure;
the day: tiredness shows up in the number.

So a good reading speed is one at which you still understand the text. If you answered all three questions, your number is a fair description of how you read today.

How to read faster

No technique removes the trade-off between speed and understanding. That is the conclusion of a large review of the research by Keith Rayner and colleagues (2016): you can go faster, but past a point you understand less. What does help is practice and a pace you raise on purpose.

Read more, and read often. Familiar words and topics go faster.
Raise the pace in small steps and stay at each step for a few sessions.
Check yourself: if you can sum up a page in a sentence or two, the pace is fine.
Try RSVP, which shows one word at a time in a fixed spot, so your eyes stop jumping along the line.

More on both in “How to choose your reading speed in words per minute” and “What is RSVP speed reading, and does it work?”.

Questions

How accurate is an online reading speed test?

It measures one reading of one short text, so treat it as a ballpark. The clock includes the moment you take to press Stop, and a text you find easy or hard moves the result. How you read ordinary books over several days says more.

What is the average reading speed for adults?

For silent reading in English, about 238 words per minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction, according to Marc Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis. Many readers are well above or below that.

Can anyone read 1,000 words per minute?

Not with full understanding of ordinary text, as far as the research shows. At such speeds people skim: they catch the general shape and some key words. That can be useful, but it is not the same as reading.

Why are there questions after the text?

Because a speed only means something if you understood what you read. The three questions are a quick check that you read rather than skimmed.

Is my result saved or sent anywhere?

No. The test runs in your browser, and your result never leaves the page. Reload it and the result is gone.

Can I measure my reading speed in Freadly?

Yes. Freadly has a calibration test: you read a short passage as you normally would and press Done, and the app works out your words per minute. The Stats tab then shows your reading pace against it.