Reading speed test

Read one passage at your normal pace, answer three questions about it, and find out how fast you actually read. Two minutes, no account, nothing saved anywhere but your own browser.

Before you start

Read at your normal pace. Rushing makes the number useless.
The clock starts the moment the passage appears and stops when you say you are done.
Three questions follow, so read for meaning, not for the stopwatch.

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Reading · the clock is running

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In the spring of 1900, a crew of Greek sponge divers sheltering from a storm anchored off Antikythera, a small island between Crete and the mainland. One of them went down to look at the seabed and surfaced with an account of bodies and horses lying scattered across the bottom. What he had found was a Roman-era shipwreck, and over the following months the divers brought up bronze and marble statues, glassware, coins and jewellery: the cargo of a ship that sank sometime in the first century before the common era.

Among the crates of finds delivered to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens was a lump of corroded bronze, roughly the size of a large book, which nobody paid much attention to. Months later it split apart in the museum, and inside were gearwheels — precisely cut bronze teeth, arranged in a way that had no business existing in the ancient world.

The object is now called the Antikythera mechanism. It is a geared calculating device, dated to somewhere in the second century before the common era, that modelled the movements of the sky. Turning a handle on the side advanced the whole machine to a chosen date, and dials on the front and back showed where the sun and the moon stood against the zodiac, the phase of the moon, and the position of the year within several interlocking calendrical cycles. It predicted eclipses. It even tracked the four-year cycle of athletic games.

Fewer than half of its parts survive — eighty-two fragments in total, most of them small — and the mechanism arrived corroded into shapeless green blocks. For most of the twentieth century, what it did was argued over on the basis of what could be seen on the surface. That changed in 2005, when a research team took the fragments to an eight-tonne X-ray tomography machine built for the purpose and looked inside them. The scans revealed gear teeth that nobody had been able to count and thousands of characters of Greek text inscribed on the plates: in effect an instruction manual, hidden inside the corrosion for two thousand years.

The count now stands at at least thirty interlocking bronze gears, and the real number was probably higher. One train of them reproduced the irregular apparent motion of the moon by mounting a wheel slightly off-centre on another — a solution of real mathematical elegance, arrived at by someone whose name is recorded nowhere.

The uncomfortable part is what came afterwards. Nothing of comparable mechanical sophistication is known from anywhere in the world for well over a thousand years, until the astronomical clocks of medieval Europe. Whoever built the mechanism belonged to a tradition of instrument-making that must have taken generations to develop, and then that tradition vanishes from the record entirely, leaving one corroded lump on a seabed as the evidence that it ever existed.

The test needs JavaScript to time your reading. The passage above is worth reading anyway.

What the number means

Adults reading ordinary prose on a page typically land somewhere between 200 and 300 words per minute. Below that is careful reading, not bad reading — and above 400 you are already faster than most people, which is worth knowing before anyone sells you a course.

Words per minute	Where that sits
under 180	Careful. Common with dense material, a second language, or reading on a small screen.
180–280	The usual range for prose on a page.
280–400	Faster than most, generally with no loss of comprehension.
400+	Quick. From here the limit is understanding rather than eye movement.

The comprehension score matters more than the speed. A high number with one answer right is not a reading speed; it is a skimming speed, and this test says so rather than congratulating you.

How the test works

The passage is roughly 460 words of ordinary narrative prose, chosen to be interesting and to need no prior knowledge. The clock starts when the text appears and stops when you press the button, so your speed is simply words divided by elapsed time. The three questions can all be answered from the passage alone.

Everything happens in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server, there is no account, and closing the tab discards the result.

Why we do not promise 1000 words per minute

Because it is not true. Presenting words faster than the language system can assemble them into sentences does not make you a faster reader; it makes you a person watching words go past. In one-word-at-a-time reading, comprehension starts to fall away for most people somewhere above 500 to 600 words per minute, and practice moves that number rather than removing it. The longer version, with what the research actually supports, is in does speed reading work?

If you want the mechanics of reading one word at a time first, start with what is RSVP reading?