Reading speed test
Pick a passage, click Start, read it at your normal pace, click Done. This measures your actual reading speed instead of assuming the 238 wpm average applies to you.
That's too short to get a reliable reading — paste at least 50 words.
Reading your own text tends to measure familiarity as much as reading speed — the result will be labeled "speed on familiar text" rather than a general reading-speed figure.
That finished awfully fast — did you skim, or click Done by mistake? A read that quick isn't a reliable measurement, so no number is shown.
You switched away from this tab mid-read, so this number may be off.
This is your speed on familiar text (you wrote it), which tends to read faster than unfamiliar text — not a general reading-speed claim.
Why one number can never be exactly right
Both the 238 wpm figure this tool compares you against, and the number you just measured, are averages — across large groups of readers, or across a single passage read once. Neither accounts for what actually varies from one reading session to the next. A reader skimming a familiar topic moves much faster than someone working through unfamiliar terminology for the first time. Dense, technical writing slows almost everyone down, regardless of their baseline speed. Reading on a phone during a commute is not the same task as reading at a desk with nothing else competing for attention.
None of this means the estimate is useless. A reading-time figure is a genuinely useful signal — it tells you roughly how big a commitment a piece of text is before you start. The mistake is treating any single wpm number, including the one above, as a fixed trait rather than a rough measurement of one read, on one day, of one passage. Read thefull explanation of where these numbers come from for more.
Why this only measures silent reading
Reading aloud is a different task, bounded by how fast you can produce the sounds rather than how fast your eyes and brain process the words — it isn't comparable to the 238 wpm silent-reading baseline this tool uses. Comparing an aloud read against a silent-reading average would make an ordinary reader look meaningfully below average for no real reason. There's no read-aloud mode here for exactly that reason — for that, use the separateoral reading fluency test, which times you hands-free by listening for speech instead.
No comprehension check
This tool measures how long it took you to click Done, not whether you actually absorbed the passage — clicking through without reading will produce a fast, meaningless number. That's a known limitation of a v1 timed exercise, not something this page tries to solve for you.