Is 400 wpm a fast reading speed?

400 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, 400 wpm gets through about 55 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 3 h 20 min of pure reading at this speed. A 2,000-word article takes 5 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 400 wpm a good reading speed?

400 wpm is faster than 97% of adults, against a mean of 238 wpm with SD 89. Faster than almost everyone measured, which at this level usually means skimming rather than reading.

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 400 wpm?

With 80,000-word books: about 27 a year at 15 minutes a day, 55 at 30 minutes and 110 at an hour. That is 162 wpm above the mean, so 22 books a year more than the average reader at 30 minutes a day.