Estimate how long it will take to read any text. Adjust the reading speed if needed.
An article of 1,850 words, read at 200 words per minute.
1,850 words, about 9 minutes 15 seconds (9.25 min).
Everything else here is division, so the accuracy of the output is entirely the accuracy of the speed you enter. Reading speed varies enormously with the material — dense technical prose, a legal clause and a news article are not read at the same rate by the same person — and it drops further when the reader is skimming for one fact rather than reading through. If you are estimating for other people rather than yourself, a lower figure is the safer error, because overrunning a stated reading time annoys readers more than undershooting it.
Runs of whitespace and dashes are both treated as separators before counting, so state-of-the-art counts as four words rather than one, and an em dash between two words does not merge them. On ordinary prose this makes very little difference. On text that is heavy with hyphenated compounds it inflates the count by a few percent, and therefore the time along with it.
The tool counts the text you paste and nothing else. Images, tables, code blocks, videos and the time a reader spends re-reading a difficult paragraph are all invisible to it. For a page with substantial non-prose content, the reading-time figure is a floor rather than an estimate — a code-heavy tutorial takes far longer than its word count suggests.
It sets an expectation before someone commits, which is why it appears at the top of articles and in newsletters. It is also a blunt editing tool: if a piece meant to take four minutes comes back at eleven, that is a structural signal rather than a formatting one. Paste the text in, cut, and paste again — the number moves immediately.
Whatever matches your reader and your material, since the tool leaves it entirely to you. Dense or technical writing is read more slowly than conversational prose, and skimming is faster than reading. If the figure is going to be shown publicly, pick a conservative speed so the stated time is one most readers can beat.
At 200 words per minute, five minutes; at 250, four; at 300, about three minutes twenty seconds. The spread between plausible reading speeds is wider than most people expect, which is why a single published figure is always an approximation.
It treats dashes as separators, so a hyphenated compound counts as more than one word. The effect on ordinary prose is negligible, but on text full of compound adjectives it nudges both the word count and the time upward by a small margin.
You can, but tags and syntax characters will be counted as text and inflate the total. Paste the rendered prose rather than the source, or strip the markup first, if you want the count to reflect what a reader actually reads.
One licence key, pasted into any CYZOR tool. Today it does three things: drops the CYZOR line from PDFs you send for signature, takes CYZOR branding off your forms and adds CSV export, and switches on the AI rewrite in the resume builder.