How many words per hour can you dictate?

When you speak a text you already have, you speak at your normal pace, about 125 to 150 words per minute, which is roughly 7,500 to 9,000 words an hour ¹. When you compose sentences as you speak them, the rate falls to roughly 480 to 900 words an hour on earlier software ². Which of those two figures applies to you depends on whether the words already exist.

Reading a prepared text runs at normal speaking pace

People speak at about 125 to 150 words per minute ³. Over an hour, that comes to about 7,500 to 9,000 words ¹. The range is a round figure the authors give, not a count from a group of speakers, so treat it as typical rather than exact.

A controlled study measured a faster rate. English speech entered on an iPhone reached 153 words per minute ⁴. That speed came from short phrases read aloud in a quiet room, and it counted the finished text, corrections included. It sits just above the normal speaking range, and it is not a rate for drafting a chapter.

Composing as you speak runs at about 480 to 900 words an hour

Composing is different from reading aloud. An earlier report on composing with speech software put the rate at 8 to 15 words per minute ⁵, which the authors described as much lower than normal speaking speed. At that rate, one hour produces about 480 to 900 words ².

That software is older than current recognizers, so a modern app may be faster. We found no study that measures composing by speech with current software, so the older figure is the best measured one we have.

Planning, not speaking, sets the pace of a book

Most of composing is planning. In an IBM study of letter writing, about two-thirds of composing time went to planning, whether the letter was written, dictated or spoken ⁶. Letters are not books, so treat this as a hint about book writing rather than a measurement of it.

The scale matters. A 50,000-word draft, about the typical minimum for a short novel, would take 56 to 104 hours at the composing rate, before any planning or editing time ⁷. At the prepared-speech rate, the same words take a fraction of that time. The gap between the two rates is the gap between speaking and composing.

Practice raises your rate, so measure it over time

Practice helps. In a longitudinal study of speech software, users became more efficient at dictation, navigation and error correction as they gained experience ⁸. So a rate measured in your first session may not hold for later ones.

The table shows which situation gives which rate, using the figures above.

What to do: plan first, dictate in sessions, and count words per session

1. Write the scene list before each session, with the point, the people and the ending of each scene. You then speak planned text, which is the fast case.
2. Dictate one scene per session and speak it through without stopping to fix sentences.
3. Count words per session, not per hour. Divide the words in the saved transcript by the minutes you spent, and you have your own rate.
4. Budget the edit separately. Corrections take time that the speaking rate does not show.

For the full method, see our guide to writing a book by dictation. Our glossary entry on words per minute explains how the rate is counted, and our overview of dictation for work and study covers the other settings where the same rates apply. For how many words writers write in a day, see how many words writers write a day, and for whether the speed of speech changes the quality of the writing, see is dictated writing worse than typed writing.