How long does it take to read 500 words out loud?

The quick answer, if that is all you came for:

So three to four minutes covers almost everybody, and 3:20 is the number to use if you need one. But the interesting part of this question is not the arithmetic. It is that the answer changes with the language you are reading, and almost no tool that answers it will tell you so.

Three different questions people ask with the same words

Most of the disagreement between calculators comes from conflating these:

• Silent reading is fast — comfortably 200–300 words a minute, because you are not constrained by your mouth.
• Reading aloud is capped by speech. Roughly 120–160 words a minute for most people.
• Reading aloud on camera is slower again. You breathe, you emphasise, you pause for effect, and you slow down when you want to be understood. This is the one you want if you are writing a script.

If you are timing a video, use the third. A 500-word script that clocks 3:20 in a quiet room will frequently run 3:40 or more on a take you would actually publish.

Where the language comes in

A word is not a fixed quantity of speech. That sounds like pedantry until you try to time a script in two languages, at which point it becomes the whole problem.

• Tamil and Telugu are agglutinative. Grammar that English spreads over several small words gets built into a single long one. So a word carries more syllables, and takes longer to say, and a 500-word Tamil script is simply more speech than a 500-word English one.
• Chinese and Japanese are not word-delimited at all. There are no spaces to count. Words per minute is not inaccurate here, it is undefined — the right unit is characters per minute.
• Devanagari scripts — Hindi, Marathi — sit between the two. Words tend to be longer than English words, so the same word count runs longer.

These are the rates our own app currently uses to turn a script into a duration, and what they do to 500 words:

Working backwards: how many words do I need?

Usually the more useful direction. Word counts for a target duration:

A caution on the short end: a 30-second script is not a 60-second script cut in half. Short videos need the hook in the first line and have no room to recover from a slow start, so 75 words of English is genuinely tight and you should expect to write 120 and cut.

Calibrate to yourself in twenty seconds

Every number above is an average, and you are not an average. Getting your own rate takes less time than reading about it:

1. Take a piece of your own script — your writing, your subject, your delivery.
2. Read it aloud for exactly 20 seconds, at the pace you would actually use on camera.
3. Count the words you got through and multiply by three.

That is your rate. Use it instead of ours. If you are setting a prompter speed, that number is the one to dial in — and if it is a long way from the default, the default was built for a different language or a different kind of delivery than yours.

Two things that break the estimate

• Numbers, names and abbreviations. “2026” is one word and four syllables. “$1,499.99” is one word and about ten. A script full of figures runs much longer than its word count suggests, and this is the single most common reason a carefully timed script overruns.
• Silence you have not written down. Pauses for emphasis, breaths between sections, and the beat you leave after a question are all real seconds that no word count contains. Add roughly 10% for anything you intend to publish.

If you are setting up a prompter rather than timing a script, the per-language detail — including why one words-per-minute number cannot serve ten languages — is in teleprompter speed by language.