Is 825 wpm a fast reading speed?

825 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, 825 wpm gets through about 113 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 1 h 37 min of pure reading at this speed. A 2,000-word article takes 2 minutes.
• Eye-movement research (Rayner et al. 2016) finds comprehension falls off when people push past about 400 to 500 wpm. A timed result this high is usually skimming, which is a useful skill, but a different one from reading.
• 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 825 wpm a good reading speed?

825 wpm is faster than over 99% 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 825 wpm?

With 80,000-word books: about 56 a year at 15 minutes a day, 113 at 30 minutes and 226 at an hour. That is 587 wpm above the mean, so 80 books a year more than the average reader at 30 minutes a day.