Is 300 wpm a fast reading speed?

300 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, 300 wpm gets through about 41 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 4 h 27 min of pure reading at this speed. A 2,000-word article takes 7 minutes.
• Above about 400 wpm comprehension starts to slip in eye-movement studies (Rayner et al. 2016), so this is near the top of what counts as reading rather than skimming.
• 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 300 wpm a good reading speed?

300 wpm is faster than 76% of adults, against a mean of 238 wpm with SD 89. Clearly fast; most adults sit between 200 and 300.

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 300 wpm?

With 80,000-word books: about 21 a year at 15 minutes a day, 41 at 30 minutes and 82 at an hour. That is 62 wpm above the mean, so 8 books a year more than the average reader at 30 minutes a day.