How does the reading speed test work?
Press Start and a short story appears, 253 to 273 words long, with the clock running. Read it the way you normally read, and press Done when you reach the end. Then answer three questions about it, without looking back. The stories were written for this site, so nobody has read them before.
How is your result calculated?
Your speed is the story's number of words divided by your reading time, in words per minute. The three questions don't change that number, but they are shown beside it: a fast speed with one answer right usually means skimming, not reading.
What is the average reading speed?
About 260 words per minute for fiction like these stories, and 238 for non-fiction. Those are the averages Marc Brysbaert found in 2019 when he combined 190 studies of adults reading English silently. Most adults fall between about 200 and 320 for fiction. Non-fiction is slower mainly because its words are longer.
Can you learn to read much faster?
A little, with practice and a bigger vocabulary, but claims of thousands of words per minute don't survive testing. A 2016 review of the research by Keith Rayner and colleagues concluded that speed-reading methods trade understanding for speed: readers who go much faster than normal take in less. The best way to read faster is to read more.
For speed with words in the other direction, try the Typing Speed Test.