Average Speaking Rate and Words per Minute

The speed at which you talk has a huge influence on how the audience perceives you and your speech. It’s important therefore to understand your speaking rate and how to alter it depending on the type of speech you are delivering.

In this article, you’ll learn how to calculate your speaking rate and how it compares to the average rate for popular talks to give you some context. Audio samples of speaking rates at the extremes are provided, so you can understand the difference in words per minute. At the end of the article, exercises are provided to help you develop an adaptive speaking rate.

How to calculate your speaking rate

Speaking rate is often expressed in words per minute (wpm). To calculate this value, you’ll need to record yourself talking for a few minutes and then add up the number of words in your speech. Divide the total number of words by the number of minutes your speech took 

Speaking rate (wpm) = total words / number of minutes

You can record yourself with your smartphone or even with a video camera. Once you have the audio of your speech, there are two ways to get the number of words:

1. Manually count the words as you listen back to the audio
2. Upload the speech recording to a speech-to-text platform. IBM Watson provides a free demo which you can use for this purpose: IBM Speech-to-text

When you have the speech converted to text format, copy the text into a software package such as Microsoft Word, which provides a useful word count for the document.

 What is the average speaking rate

 The average speaking rate changes dramatically for the purpose of your speech. According to the National Center for Voice and Speech, the average conversation rate for English speakers in the United States is about 150 wpm. However for radio presenters  the wpm is higher.

Here is a list of average speech rates for different activities.

Average speech rates

• Presentations: between 100 - 150 wpm for a comfortable pace
• Conversational: between 120 - 150 wpm
• Audio books: between 150 - 160 wpm, which is the upper range that people comfortably hear  words
• Radio hosts : between 150 - 160 wpm
• Auctioneers: can speak at about 250 wpm
• Commentators: between 250- 400 wpm

To give these speech rates some context, if the speaking pace is 130 words per minute, you’ll finish reading an A4 page in 4 minutes, 51 sec

Extremes of speaking rate - world record pace

 Steven Woodmore is a British electronics salesman and comedian known for his rapid speech articulation, being able to articulate 637 wpm, a speed four times faster than the average person.

Wood more was listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's fastest talker, a title which he held for five years, taking the helm from the previous record holder.

A comparison of words per minute for popular TED Talks

Lets compare different presentation styles to show you how speech rates can vary widely. We’ll use popular TED Talks to compare words per minute for different presentations.

We’ve anayles five TED Talks, ranging from short speeches up to 22 minutes. When we were calculating the length of the presentation, we included time when the audience was clapping and when the presenter changed slides.

We tried to pick from a wide range of speech topics to get a unbiased average.

The average speaking rate was 173 words per minute.

The speaking rate ranged from 154 to 201 words per minute.

What influences your overall speaking rate?

 Here are several factors that affect the overall speaking rate, most of which can be controlled by you.

• Regular speaking rate – this is the result of your environment, where you grew up, your parents, culture, friends around you and more.
• Nervousness – you’ve probably noticed it yourself, when you are nervous, you speak much quicker and take short shallow breaths as you rush through the content.
• Saying something urgent – understandably, we speak much quicker when there is an emergency, for example calling an ambulance or explaining an incident to the police.
• Mental fatigue – tiredness affects our thought process, making it harder for us to articulate ourselves, causing us to talk more slowly.
• Complexity of the words – longer, more complex words will take slightly longer to say, and if you are counting words per minute, it will affect speech pace slightly (although somewhat negligible)
• Complexity of content – if you are presenting complex content, you’ll want to speak slower than usual to give the audience time to comprehend the concepts and content.
• Verbal pauses – pauses are a great way to break up the content and give emphasis to what you are saying. Naturally this will slow down your speaking rate. Read 10 Effective Ways to use Pauses in your Speech.
• Event driven pauses – these are pauses caused by a change in slides, a demo of your product, checking your notes and so on.

• Audience driven pauses – these events are caused by y

 

 

 

 

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