How much time should I leave for questions and slides?

Treat the spoken figure as the floor and budget the rest separately. A common working rule is to write for about eighty per cent of the slot and let the remainder absorb pauses, a demonstration that misbehaves and the questions you actually want. On a ten-minute slot at 150 words a minute that means writing 1,200 words rather than 1,500 — the same script this article started from, and the reason it was chosen.

Is the pace the same in every language?

Words a minute is not comparable across languages, because a word is not the same size in each. Languages that pack more syllables into a word produce fewer words a minute at the same speaking speed, and languages built from short words produce more. Within one language the figure is stable and useful; across two it is not, so time a rehearsal in the language you will actually speak rather than converting a rate you read somewhere.

How many words fit a five-minute lightning talk?

About 750 at 150 words a minute, and rather fewer in practice. Short formats punish overrun harder than long ones, because there is no slack anywhere to give back — write for four minutes of speech and let the fifth carry the opening, the pauses and the closing line you want people to leave with.

The Same 1,200 Words Run from Seven Minutes to Eleven

Published 9/17/2026 · 4 min read · Everyday calculators

Daniel Okonkwo — Front-end developer and tech writer at OneKitly

Web performance · File formats

Checked against 3 sources

View profile →

In short

Take a script of 1,200 words. Read at a podcast pace of 170 words a minute it lasts 7 min 04 s. At a presentation pace of 150 it lasts exactly 8 minutes. At conversational 130 it lasts 9 min 14 s, and at the deliberate 110 of a formal address it lasts 10 min 55 s. That is a spread of nearly four minutes on a text that never changed a word — enough to turn a comfortable ten-minute slot into an overrun. Run it the other way and the useful number appears: a ten-minute slot holds 1,500 words at 150 words a minute, 1,100 at 110, 1,700 at 170. A standard eighteen-minute conference talk at 150 is 2,700 words. Those figures are a floor, not a duration: pauses, a slide that needs looking at, a question taken mid-flow and the breath after a joke all add time and none of them are in the word count.

Delivery speed decides a talk's length more than the script does. At 170 words a minute the same text takes 7 min 04 s; at 110 it takes 10 min 55 s — and only one of those fits a ten-minute slot.

Nerves make you faster, not slower

Rehearsing alone in a quiet room tends to produce a slower reading than the real thing, because there is no audience to speed up for. On the day, most speakers drift up the scale: a rehearsal at 130 becomes a delivery at 150 or beyond, and a talk timed to fill the slot exactly finishes early with an awkward gap. The fix is not to add material but to know which pace you actually used — time one rehearsal against the word count, get your own words per minute out of it, and use that number rather than a preset. The calculator's bands exist for that: under 120 reads as slow, 120 to 160 as natural, 160 to 200 as fast, and above 200 as very fast, which is a rate an audience can follow only for short stretches.

Paste the script, do not estimate it

The tool takes either a word count or the text itself, and the text is the better input for a reason that has nothing to do with convenience: people misjudge how long their own writing is, and a paragraph that reads as short on screen can be two hundred words. Pasting also makes the count reproducible — the same text gives the same duration tomorrow, which matters when a slot is fixed and the script is still being edited. If you are writing to a target instead, work backwards: fix the minutes, fix the pace, and the word budget is the product of the two.

Words a minute

A 1,200-word script at four common paces
Pace	Words a minute	Duration
Formal address	110	10 min 55 s
Conversation	130	9 min 14 s
Presentation	150	8 min 00 s
Podcast	170	7 min 04 s

Worked with our own calculator

Speech time calculator

Given

Word count: 1,000
Speaking speed (words/min): 130

Result

Speaking time (minutes): 7.692

These figures are produced by the calculator below, not typed in by hand — they are recomputed whenever the tool changes.

Run it on your own figures →

Frequently asked questions

How much time should I leave for questions and slides?: Treat the spoken figure as the floor and budget the rest separately. A common working rule is to write for about eighty per cent of the slot and let the remainder absorb pauses, a demonstration that misbehaves and the questions you actually want. On a ten-minute slot at 150 words a minute that means writing 1,200 words rather than 1,500 — the same script this article started from, and the reason it was chosen.
Is the pace the same in every language?: Words a minute is not comparable across languages, because a word is not the same size in each. Languages that pack more syllables into a word produce fewer words a minute at the same speaking speed, and languages built from short words produce more. Within one language the figure is stable and useful; across two it is not, so time a rehearsal in the language you will actually speak rather than converting a rate you read somewhere.
How many words fit a five-minute lightning talk?: About 750 at 150 words a minute, and rather fewer in practice. Short formats punish overrun harder than long ones, because there is no slack anywhere to give back — write for four minutes of speech and let the fifth carry the opening, the pauses and the closing line you want people to leave with.

Articles you may find interesting

All guides →

How-toHow Long Does It Take to Read a Book?Estimate reading time from word count and reading speed. Learn the simple formula, the average of about 250 words per minute, and a worked example for a full novel.GuideThe Pomodoro Method: How Long to Work and How Long to RestTwenty-five and five come from Francesco Cirillo's method, not from a trial. What the research actually measured is task switching and the cost of getting back in — and the reason a fixed interval helps is not that 25 minutes is optimal. Plus what the planner really returns, including the long break it quietly leaves out.ExplainerDetecting the Language of a Text, and Why Short Texts FailMeasured, not asserted: 90 short real phrases across six languages, none declined and 68 right — 76%, falling to 64% under sixteen letters. Four of the wrong answers came back at 100% confidence.How-toExtracting the Text from a PDF, and What the Layout Does to ItA PDF stores glyphs at coordinates — not lines, not paragraphs, not a reading order. Extraction rebuilds the text from those positions, which is why two columns come out interleaved, a table loses its cells, and a scan gives you nothing at all. Measured by running the tool.ExplainerCounting Characters Against a Limit Someone Else SetOne emoji is 1 character, or 7, or 11, or 25, depending on who is counting. Which one your form, your database and your SMS gateway mean — and a one-paste test that tells you which you are facing.ExplainerSentence Case and Title Case: The Rules Differ by LanguageEnglish title case has three different cutoffs depending on the style guide. French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian have none at all. German capitalises every noun. The tool knows about none of this — here is exactly what it does.

Sources

Spotted a mistake in this article?