Fact · Typing and writing speed
5sources
The speaking rate in words per minute dataset draws on 5 distinct sources.
Calculated from 7 data points on October 19, 2026
- How it is calculated
- Count of the distinct sources behind the dataset's 7 rows: 5.
A statistic of the dataset Speaking Rate Statistics: Words per Minute, calculated by code from its published rows.
Calculated from
- The same meta-analysis, using 77 studies and 5,965 participants, finds an average oral reading rate of 183 words per minute.
- In a 2024 BrainGate study, one participant's copy task was decoded at his self-paced speaking rate of 31.6 words per minute.
- The overall speaking rate of John F. Kennedy's inaugural address was 96.5 words per minute, the second slowest of the inaugural addresses in the past 60 years.
- Sean Shannon's Guinness record recitation of the 260-word Hamlet soliloquy ran at 655 words per minute.
- In large corpora of conversational telephone speech in English and Chinese, the overall average rate was 196 words per minute, counting all elapsed time.
- Measured over elapsed time, the speaking rate of individual conversations ranges from 111 to 291 words per minute.
- When silences and non-speech noises are removed from conversational telephone speech, the average net speaking rate is 236 words per minute.