Answer: At a typical speaking pace of 130 words per minute, a 10 minute speech will be about 1,300 words.
Speech and publication coach Daphne Gray-Grant says that the average person speaks at about 125 to 150 words per minute (wpm) which means a ten minute speech uses about 1,200 to 1,500 words. That’s about the typical length of a blog article! Use our online word count tool to quickly count how many words are in your speech.
How can you measure your spoken words per minute?
An easy way to measure how many words you can speech per minute is to write a 650 word essay. Then get out a stopwatch and measure how long it takes you to speak all of the words.
Divide 650 words by the number of minutes in decimals and you’ll get how many words per minute you speak.
For example, if it takes you 4.5 minutes to speak 650 words, you would do 650 divided by 4.5 and get 144 words per minute.
Word Count per Speech Length
The following table will tell you how many words a typical speech has depending on the length. If you’re looking to quickly understand how many words you need to write for a speech depending on your speaking speed, just check the table below:
Speech Length | Slow (100 wpm) | Average (130 wpm) | Fast (160 wpm) |
1 minute | 100 words | 130 words | 160 words |
5 minutes | 500 words | 650 words | 800 words |
10 minutes | 1,000 words | 1,300 words | 1,600 words |
15 minutes | 1,500 words | 1,950 words | 2,400 words |
20 minutes | 2,000 words | 2,600 words | 3,200 words |
25 minutes | 2,500 words | 3,250 words | 4,000 words |
30 minutes | 3,000 words | 3,900 words | 4,800 words |
45 minutes | 4,500 words | 5,850 words | 7,200 words |
60 minutes | 6,000 words | 7,800 words | 9,600 words |
120 minutes | 12,000 words | 15,600 words | 19,200 words |