Reading Speed Test: Find Your Words per Minute and Ideal Scroll Speed
Take the test
Press start, read the passage at your normal pace, then press “I’m done”. Don’t skim – read the way you’d read an article you care about.
For most of history, reading was something you did with your hands as much as your eyes. Scrolls had to be unrolled, pages had to be turned, and the reader decided exactly when the next line arrived. The screen changed the material but not the habit. On a phone we still pull each new paragraph into view with a thumb, dozens of times a minute, often without noticing.
That small movement has a cost. Every swipe is a decision about distance, and we rarely get it right. Swipe too far and the line you were reading jumps off the top of the screen, so your eyes have to hunt for it again. Swipe too little and you stop in the middle of a thought to swipe once more. Each correction is short, but together they break the rhythm that makes reading feel effortless.
Comics show the problem most clearly. A vertical webtoon is designed as one long strip, with pauses and reveals built into the spacing between panels. When the strip moves at a steady pace, those pauses land the way the artist intended. When it moves in jerks, a joke can be spoiled by a panel that arrives early, or a quiet moment can be rushed past.
Reading speed is personal. It changes with the language, the topic, the time of day and how tired you are. The useful question is not how fast the average person reads, but how fast you read this kind of text right now, and whether the page can keep up with you instead of the other way around.
0 words per minute
Suggested Glida starting speeds
| What you’re reading | Start with |
|---|---|
| Articles, news and blogs | |
| Webtoons and manhwa (vertical) | |
| Manga pages (page scroll) |
These are starting points. If lines leave the top of the screen before you finish them, step down; if you’re waiting for the page, step up.
The test above times how long you take to read a short passage and divides the word count by your time. It runs entirely in your browser – nothing you do is sent anywhere.
How fast does the average person read?
The most thorough answer comes from a 2019 meta-analysis by psychologist Marc Brysbaert, which pooled 190 studies with nearly 18,000 participants. For adults reading silently in English, he found an average of:
| Text type | Average speed |
|---|---|
| Non-fiction | 238 words per minute |
| Fiction | 260 words per minute |
| Reading aloud | 183 words per minute |
Most readers fall between roughly 175 and 300 words per minute for non-fiction. Speeds well above 400 words per minute usually mean skimming, with a clear drop in how much is remembered.
Speed also depends on the language. A multilingual study by Trauzettel-Klosinski and Dietz (2012), which used comparable texts in 17 languages, measured English readers at about 228 words per minute and found big differences between languages – partly because words are longer in some languages than others. If you’re reading in a second language, expect to be slower, and set your scroll speed accordingly.
What affects your result
- Device and font size. Small text on a phone is slower to read than a printed page. Use the text size you normally read with.
- Topic. A familiar subject reads faster than a technical one.
- Time of day and tiredness. Re-test when you’re fresh and when you’re tired – the gap can be large.
- Knowing it’s a test. People often speed up when timed. Read the way you read an article you care about.
Turning words per minute into a scroll speed
Auto scrolling feels right when the page moves at the same speed your eyes do. Too fast, and lines leave the top of the screen before you finish them. Too slow, and you end up waiting for the next line – which pulls you out of the text just like swiping does.
The calculator suggests a starting point based on three kinds of content:
- Articles, news and blogs are almost all text, so the suggestion follows your words-per-minute result directly.
- Webtoons and manhwa carry less text per screen and more artwork, so most readers can scroll them a step faster than an article.
- Manga is read a page at a time. A typical page has around 40–60 words of dialogue plus time to take in the art, so the calculator suggests how many seconds to spend per page. In Glida, that’s the Page scroll setting, which flips one screen at a time on a timer.
These are starting points, not rules. Start there, read for a minute, then nudge the speed until you stop noticing the scroll at all.
How to read faster (without skimming)
- Read in a steady rhythm. Stopping to scroll, re-find your line and start again costs more time than people expect. A steady auto scroll removes those stops.
- Reduce clutter. Safari Reader strips sidebars and ads from articles, so your eyes have less to skip past.
- Increase line spacing slightly. Very dense text slows most people down.
- Raise your speed gradually. If you use an auto scroll, raise it by a small step each week rather than jumping straight to “Fast”.
Sources
- Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047.
- Trauzettel-Klosinski, S., & Dietz, K. (2012). Standardized assessment of reading performance: The new International Reading Speed Texts IReST. Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, 53(9), 5452–5461.
Want to know every way to scroll hands-free on iPhone? Read How to auto scroll on iPhone & iPad.