Is 975 wpm a fast reading speed?

975 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, 975 wpm gets through about 133 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 22 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 975 wpm a good reading speed?

975 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 975 wpm?

With 80,000-word books: about 67 a year at 15 minutes a day, 133 at 30 minutes and 267 at an hour. That is 737 wpm above the mean, so 100 books a year more than the average reader at 30 minutes a day.