Reading speed test
Read a short passage at your normal pace, then answer four questions about it. You get your words per minute and how much of it you understood.
- About 3 minutes
- No account needed
- Runs in your browser
The curve of forgetting
Written for this test · general level
How the test scores you
Speed alone rewards skimming, so the test measures two things and puts them together.
298 words ÷ 1.05 min284 wpmSpeed. The test divides the words by the time between Start reading and Done reading.
3 right ÷ 4 questions75%Comprehension. You answer without looking back. Each question points to the sentence it came from.
284 wpm × 75%213 wpmEffective speed. Your speed times your comprehension. Skimming raises your speed and lowers this number.
What is an average reading speed?
A 2019 review of 190 studies with 18,573 readers found that adults read English silently at about 238 words per minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. Reading aloud averaged about 183 words per minute.
- 260 words per minute
Silent, fiction
This covers novels and stories.
- 238 words per minute
Silent, non-fiction
This covers textbooks, articles and reports, which is most study reading.
- 183 words per minute
Reading aloud
Reading aloud is held to the speed of speech.
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. doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
Questions
For non-fiction, about 240 words per minute is typical for an adult, and 300 or more is fast. A good result also keeps comprehension at three or four out of four. A faster speed with two wrong answers usually means skimming.
Only a little, and mostly by reading more. A 2016 review of speed-reading research, by Keith Rayner and colleagues, found that large gains in speed come with lower comprehension. What you can change is how much you keep afterwards. Answering questions about a text, and coming back to them over the next weeks, keeps far more of it than a single read.
Yes. Each language has the same two passages and their questions in that language. Chinese, Japanese and Korean results are given in characters per minute, which is how reading speed is measured in those languages.
No. The test runs in your browser, and nothing is sent to a server. Copy result puts it on your clipboard if you want to keep it.
Related
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