Fact · Typing and writing speed
196words 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.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“we find an overall average rate of 196 words per minute (WPM)”
Towards an integrated understanding of speaking rate in conversation, Jiahong Yuan et al., Interspeech 2006, 2006, Paper text, overall rate.
Open the original- What it measures
- The rate adds up the words of both speakers and divides by the total elapsed time, so it includes silences and listening turns.
- What it does not show
- Spontaneous telephone conversation, not prepared dictation. Individual conversations range from 111 to 291 words per minute, and the figure depends on how pauses are counted.
Source
Used to calculate
- In conversational telephone speech, about 17 percent of elapsed time carries no speech, by the difference between the overall and net rates.
- Conversational telephone speech averaged 196 words per minute, about 3.8 times the 51.56 words per minute average of the large online typing study.
- The overall conversational speaking rate is about 3.8 times the keyboard typing average from the online study. The figures come from different samples.
- Shannon's 655 words per minute is about 3.3 times the overall conversational speaking rate of 196 words per minute.
- Average silent reading of non-fiction is about 1.2 times as fast as the overall rate of conversational speech.
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