Reading Speed Test
Read a short passage against the clock and find out your reading speed in words per minute.
You are about to read a short passage of 289 words. When you press start, a timer begins and the passage appears. Read it once, at your natural pace, then press the finish button the moment you reach the end.
Read to understand, not just to sprint. Your result is an estimate of your silent reading speed in words per minute.
What counts as a good reading speed
It is tempting to treat reading speed as a score to beat, but the honest answer is that most adults sit closer together than you might expect. In a 2019 meta-analysis, Marc Brysbaert pooled results from more than a hundred studies and put average adult silent reading of non-fiction at roughly 238 words per minute, with fiction a touch faster at around 260. If your result lands anywhere in that range, you are reading at a perfectly normal, healthy pace.
What the number cannot tell you is how much you actually kept. Comprehension matters far more than raw speed, and the two do not rise together forever. Push your eyes to race down the page and understanding tends to fall away, which is why claims of reading many thousands of words per minute rarely survive a proper test of recall. A steady pace that lets ideas connect and settle will serve your memory better than a sprint you cannot remember.
So use this result as a gentle baseline rather than a target. The more useful habit is showing up often: a few focused minutes of reading each day builds attention and, over time, speed follows on its own. If you want to turn that into a routine, read about building a daily learning habit and what microlearning is, which applies exactly this idea of short, regular sessions that stick.