Home/Reading speed test
Measure your reading
Two things decide how fast you get through a book: the words you already know, and the pace you can take them at. This measures both, and either can be taken on its own.
You keep going until a detail slips past you. Where that happens is your reading speed — the pace you can still read at, rather than the pace you can make words disappear at.
Choose
What would you like to measure?
The full assessment measures your vocabulary first, then your reading speed one word at a time. Each part can also be taken on its own.
First, one question
What do you actually want to read?
This picks the passages you will be timed on. There is no wrong answer and it does not affect your score.
Passage 1 · one question
Which of these words appeared in what you just read?
Optional · scanning
Find the words
You will be shown a block of real book text and a short list of words hidden in it. Click each one as you spot it. The clock runs from the moment the text appears, and each round gives you more text and more to find.
This is not reading and the result is not a reading speed. Scanning is rejecting words until one matches — it runs far faster than reading, and it is a separate skill worth knowing your number for.
0 words a minute, scanning
0 words per minute, on an ordinary page
Vocabulary · 1 of 36
Which is closest in meaning to ?
0 lemmas of the library’s vocabulary
A lemma is a word, not a spelling. Run, runs, ran and running are four spellings of one word. Counted as spellings, this library holds 158,009 of them; counted as words, 122,565.
We count lemmas because every published figure does. An average twenty-year-old American knows about 42,000 — a number you can only compare yourself to if we are both counting the same thing.
You have just learned the word lemma. Your count went up by one, and that is not a joke — it is the whole argument, performed on the smallest possible scale.
Your system asks for reduced motion. This test works by flashing one word at a time and cannot be adapted without ceasing to measure anything — skip it if rapid movement is a problem for you.
- 1180 wpmThe Wonderful Wizard of Oz
- 2240 wpmDracula
- 3310 wpmThe Secret Garden
- 4390 wpmThe Legend of Sleepy Hollow
- 5480 wpmThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer
It takes about three minutes. Read each passage as you normally would — the words come at you whether you are ready or not, which is the point. Your result stays in your browser; the finishing number on its own, with nothing attached to it, is counted toward the average of readers here.
Stage 1 · one question
0 words per minute
At that pace: The Prince in 3h 19m, Frankenstein in 4h 59m, Moby Dick in 14h 05m. All books →
One question a stage is a rough instrument — a lucky guess flatters you and a careless tap does the opposite. Run it again if the number looks wrong.
Questions
What the number means
What is a good reading speed?
There is no single answer, and any site quoting you an exact average is being more confident than the evidence supports. Reading speed moves enormously with the material, and it moves again depending on whether you need to keep what you read. The number this test gives you is the fastest stage where you still caught the detail, which is a more useful figure than the fastest speed you can make words go past.
Why does it ask questions?
Because a speed test without one measures clicking. It is trivial to let words blur past at 700 words per minute and call it reading; the question after each stage is what separates the pace you can read at from the pace you can tolerate. One question per stage is a rough instrument, but it is a far better instrument than none.
Why does it get faster each stage?
Because a threshold is found by crossing it. Starting slow and stepping up until the detail stops landing tells you where your limit is; a single fixed speed only tells you whether you were above or below it. Each stage runs at 250, 350, 450, 600 and 800 words per minute.
What if I fail the first stage?
250 words per minute is around where a lot of people read continuous prose, so failing it usually means the format was unfamiliar rather than that you read slowly. Word-at-a-time reading takes a page or two to settle into. Run it again.
Why passages from old books?
Because they are public domain, so a passage can be shown in full and you can go and read the whole book afterwards for nothing. They are also harder than most modern prose, which makes the result honest rather than flattering.
The passages come from public-domain books you can read in full on Liminanotio, a word-at-a-time speed reader that keeps your place in every book and paces itself to the words you already know.