Words to Minutes: How Long a Speech Takes

To turn words into minutes, divide the number of words by a speaking rate in words per minute. The rate is the whole question, and it is better taken from a measurement than from a rule of thumb. Across 95 university video lectures, speakers averaged 144.3 words per minute ¹. In a corpus of British English, academic lectures averaged 173 words per minute ². At those two rates, 1,000 words take between 5 minutes 47 seconds and 6 minutes 56 seconds.

The calculator above uses measured rates only. Each row names the study it comes from and opens the fact with the study's own words. For how speaking rate is measured and what changes it, see the guide to speaking speed.

Measured speaking rates set the conversion

The rate depends on what kind of speaking it is. Prepared talk to an audience is slower than conversation, and reading a text aloud sits in between.

The reading-aloud figure is the strongest single number here, because it pools 77 studies. The lecture figures are the most useful for a speech or a presentation, because they come from people talking to an audience rather than reading.

A 5-minute talk holds about 720 to 865 words

The question also runs the other way: how many words to write for a talk of a given length. At the two measured lecture rates, the answers are:

Write to the lower column if the talk has slides, demonstrations, questions or applause, since the clock keeps running while nobody speaks. The British lecture corpus found a range of 125 to 247 words per minute between lecturers ², so a fast speaker can say almost twice as much as a slow one in the same slot. Timing yourself once on your own script beats any average; the steps are in how to calculate speaking speed.

Writing the same words takes three to eight times longer

Speaking 1,000 words takes minutes. Writing them takes much longer, which is the gap dictation closes.

The typing rates come from very large online studies, so they describe ordinary typists rather than trained ones. The handwriting rate comes from university students copying a short text. The dictation rate comes from a controlled study in which participants dictated short messages on an iPhone, and it includes the time spent correcting recognition errors. At these rates, typing on a keyboard takes about three times as long as dictating, and handwriting about seven times as long. The research behind that comparison, including where typing still wins, is in speaking vs typing speed.

Where the averages mislead

Three things move a real talk away from these rates.

• Language and fluency. University students in one study spoke English at 235 words per minute as a first language and at 173 as a second language ^{11 12}. If you are presenting in a language you learned, plan on the slower figure.
• Speaking or reading. A script read aloud comes out faster than the same ideas spoken freely, because no time goes to finding the next sentence. Time a read-through and a talk from notes separately. More on reading pace is in how many words per minute reading aloud takes.
• The setting. A recorded voice-over runs at a steadier pace than a live talk with an audience, and audiobooks are paced for listening. The ranges for voice work are in words per minute for voice-overs and audiobooks, and for talks in words per minute for a presentation.

For the full set of measurements behind these rates, open the speaking rate dataset and the text entry rates dataset.