We want to estimate how long it takes a reader to read a certain blog post.
If we assume that there exist a statistic such as the average reading speed we can compute the reading time expressed in minutes by:
- computing the number of words in the blog post
- dividing (1) by the average reading speed (words-per-minute)
def read_time_in_minutes(content: str) -> int:
AVERAGE_READING_SPEED_WPM = ???
return len(content.split(' ')) // AVERAGE_READING_SPEED_WPM
The problem now becomes assigning a value to AVERAGE_READING_SPEED_WPM.
Accordingly to a paper released in 2019 [1] the average reading speed for adult English speakers is 238 WPM for non-fiction work, and 183 WPM for fiction work.
Most speakers fall in the 175-300 words-per-minute range, with non-native speakers having a lower reading speed than native ones.
This blog post is built with the Hugo static-site generator which includes the ReadingTime method for computing the estimated reading time in minutes:
By default, Hugo assumes a reading speed of 212 words per minute. For CJK languages, it assumes 500 words per minute.
The reading speed assumed by Hugo is not that far from the one suggested by the paper mentioned earlier.
Let’s close up this post with the final version of read_time_in_minutes:
def read_time_in_minutes(content: str) -> int:
AVERAGE_READING_SPEED_WPM = 238
return len(content.split(' ')) // AVERAGE_READING_SPEED_WPM
References #
- Marc Brysbaert, How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate, Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 109, 2019, 104047, ISSN 0749-596X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047.