Is 125 wpm a fast reading speed?

125 wpm by group

Percentile is the share of adults who read slower than this. “1 in X” counts the rarer side: people at or beyond this value above the median, at or under it below. Percentiles are estimated from a normal distribution with mean 238 wpm and SD 89.

What this means

• At 30 minutes a day, 125 wpm gets through about 17 books of 80,000 words a year, the book length our reading test assumes. The average reader at 238 wpm manages 33.
• One 80,000-word novel takes 10 h 40 min of pure reading at this speed. A 2,000-word article takes 16 minutes.
• Below 200 wpm is common for a second language or for dense text. Reading speed is mostly vocabulary: words you know on sight are words you do not have to decode.
• Brysbaert's mean pools studies of adults silently reading English non-fiction. A timed test on a screen runs a little fast, because you know the clock is on.

Questions

Is 125 wpm a good reading speed?

125 wpm is faster than 10% of adults, against a mean of 238 wpm with SD 89. Slower than nearly all adults measured. Vocabulary, not eye speed, is usually the bottleneck.

What is the average reading speed?

Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis puts adult silent reading at 238 words per minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction, with reading aloud at 183. The older figure of 300 wpm came from small samples of college students.

How many books a year is 125 wpm?

With 80,000-word books: about 9 a year at 15 minutes a day, 17 at 30 minutes and 34 at an hour. That is 113 wpm below the mean, so 16 books a year fewer than the average reader at 30 minutes a day.