Words per minute for speeches: how fast to talk, and how to find your own pace

You are given minutes, but you write words. Your speaking pace, in words per minute, is what turns one into the other. Get it wrong and a five-minute speech becomes seven, or finishes so early that the host is still finding the microphone.

The typical figures

These are the paces people quote, and where they come from. They describe English speech and they are ranges, not rules.

Pace	Words a minute	What it sounds like
Slow	about 110	Deliberate, with room to pause after each point
Steady	about 130	A prepared speech at a calm pace
Conversational	about 150	Everyday talk; a brisk presentation
Fast	about 170	An energetic talk, close to TED speed

Speech coaches usually give 130 to 150 words a minute for a prepared talk. The National Center for Voice and Speech puts average conversation in American English at about 150. VirtualSpeech timed several popular TED talks and found an average of 173, with the slowest at 154 and the fastest at 201.

The speech time calculator has these four as buttons, plus a box for your own pace.

What each pace means for your word count

The arithmetic is minutes × words per minute. Here is what fits, rounded down so a speech written to the number does not run over.

Length	110 wpm	130 wpm	150 wpm	170 wpm
1 minute	110	130	150	170
3 minutes	330	390	450	510
5 minutes	550	650	750	850
7 minutes	770	910	1,050	1,190
10 minutes	1,100	1,300	1,500	1,700

The gap between slow and fast is large: 300 words in five minutes. That is why a word count borrowed from someone else’s speech so often goes wrong. It was written for their pace, not yours.

Plan at the slower figure

Two things push a speech away from its rehearsal time, in opposite directions.

Nerves speed you up. Most speakers talk faster in front of a room than at a desk. A speech that just fits in rehearsal often finishes early on the day, and the speaker fills the gap by rushing the ending.

The room slows the clock. Laughter, applause, a pause after a line that lands, a sip of water, a slide that will not advance: none of it appears in a word count, and all of it takes seconds.

Writing to 130 words a minute covers both. If you speed up, you still land on time; if the audience laughs, there is room for it. The calculator’s pause allowance adds 10% or 20% of the speaking time on top for exactly this, and a slide allowance adds a few seconds for each slide change.

Find your own pace in a minute

The figures above are a starting point. Your own pace is better.

1. Take a paragraph of 150 to 250 words that sounds like your speech.
2. Stand up, and read it aloud at the volume you would use in the room.
3. Time it. Divide the words by the minutes.

210 words in 1 minute 30 seconds is 140 words a minute. Paste the paragraph into the speech time calculator to count it, then type your figure into its own-pace box. Every result and the word-count table update to your pace.

Reading quietly at a desk is always faster than speaking to a room, so do it standing. If you will speak in Hindi, time a Hindi paragraph: the calculator counts Devanagari words the same way, but the four preset paces are English figures.

Check it with a full run-through

Once the draft is written to your pace, time the whole thing. The speech timer counts up like a club timekeeper’s watch, with green, amber and red lights at the points you choose. If amber comes on with more than a minute of material left, cut a section rather than speeding up.

For a video or a talk read from a screen, the teleprompter scrolls at a pace you set in words a minute and counts words the same way as the calculator, so a script that fits in one fits in the other.

Related guides

• How many words is a 5-minute speech? gives counts from 1 to 20 minutes and where to cut.
• How long is a 1,000-word speech? goes the other way, from words to minutes.
• Toastmasters timing rules covers the club lengths and the lights.