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Words to speaking time
How long will your script take to speak? Type the words, pick a slow, medium or fast pace, and get the minutes and seconds.
Four steps from a script to a number of seconds.
- 1 · Give the amount of words
- Type the word count in the first field, or paste the text of your script into the second one. A pasted text is counted for you: the words are the whitespace-separated tokens that carry a letter or a digit, so a dash on its own is not a word.
- 2 · Pick a speaking pace
- Slow, medium or fast. Every pace on this page is a measured rate of English speech with its source and the date of the check, not a rule of thumb. A pace is a rate, so the estimate is a rate times the amount of words.
- 3 · Read the result
- The result shows the time in minutes and seconds, and the table under it repeats the estimate at the other two paces, so you can see how much the choice of pace moves the answer.
- 4 · Go the other way
- Switch the direction to time to words and enter the length of a recording. The tool then tells you how many words fit into it, which is the number to look for when you write a script for a slot of a given length.
Three measured rates of English speech.
The three paces come from one study of 2,438 word-aligned English conversations: the slowest of them ran at 111 words per minute, the turn-wise rate was 164, and the overall average was 196. The presets below are those measurements rounded to 110, 160 and 195.
| Pace | Words per minute | Minutes per 1,000 words | What was measured |
|---|---|---|---|
| Slow | 110 | 9.1 | the slowest of the 2,438 word-aligned English Switchboard conversations (111 WPM) |
| Medium | 160 | 6.3 | the turn-wise speaking rate in the same corpus (164 WPM), which counts the pauses between turns |
| Fast | 195 | 5.1 | the overall average rate of English conversation, pauses included (196 WPM); individual conversations ran from 111 to 291 WPM |
Source: Yuan, Liberman & Cieri (2006), INTERSPEECH 2006, ID 06-178, https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/icslp06_final.pdf; accessed 2026-10-22. Cross-check: Ruan et al. (2017), IMWUT 1(2), arXiv:1608.07323v2, measured 153 WPM for English speech dictated into a microphone, https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.07323; accessed 2026-10-22. The paces are measurements of English speech; they are not calibrated for any other language.
Questions about the estimate.
- How many words do I speak in a minute?
- It depends on the delivery. The three paces on this page are 110, 160 and 195 words per minute, each taken from a measurement of English speech rather than from a rule of thumb. A careful presentation sits nearer the slow end, a normal delivery in the middle, and a fast read at the other end.
- Is my text sent anywhere?
- No. The calculation runs in your browser, in the page itself. There is no form to submit, no file to upload and no request that carries your text: the page asks the server for nothing but its own files, and it stores nothing.
- How are the words of my script counted?
- A word is a whitespace-separated token that carries at least one letter or a digit. Punctuation alone does not make a word, so “one two — three” counts as three words, and a number such as “2026” counts as one.
- Why is the estimate shorter than my recording?
- A recording holds more than speech: pauses, breaths, a restart of a sentence, a drink of water. The tool multiplies a rate by an amount of words, so it estimates the speech itself. Use the pace that matches how you actually deliver, and leave room on top of it.
- Does it work for languages other than English?
- The math does, but the numbers do not: the three paces are measurements of English speech, and the page does not publish rates for any other language. Treat the result for another language as a rough guess rather than a measured rate.