Advanced options
Working figures: a 5-minute speech is about 650 words at presentation pace, a 10-minute talk 1,300, a best man's speech ideally under 1,000. Pauses, laughter and slides all slow delivery: draft 10% under the slot, never over.
What The Speech Time Calculator Works Out
- Speaking time: word count divided by words per minute. Spoken English runs slower than people draft for: conversation flows at 150 to 170 wpm, but a presentation delivered well drops to 120 to 140 once pauses, emphasis and audience reaction take their share, so 1,000 words is nearly eight minutes at the lectern, not the six a silent read-through suggests.
- Common slots: the word budget for 5, 10, 15 and 20 minutes at the chosen pace. The planning figures are about 650 words for five minutes and 1,300 for ten at presentation pace.
- Occasions: wedding speeches land best at five to eight minutes (a best man's material thins past 1,000 words), eulogies at three to five, conference talks slower than meetings because slides and rooms add friction, and broadcast reads faster and tighter, radio scripts timing at three words a second.
- Your measured pace (advanced): time yourself reading 200 words aloud and enter your real words per minute to replace the preset. Reading aloud with a phone timer is the only measurement that matters and reveals sentences that fit on paper but not in a breath.
- Pauses and total time (advanced): slide changes, deliberate pauses and laugh lines each cost seconds that the word count cannot see. Deliberate pauses of two to three seconds feel enormous to the speaker and merely confident to the room.
- Fit to your slot (advanced): compares the total with the time you have been given and says how many words to cut or how much time is spare. Nerves accelerate most speakers by 10% to 20%, but live delivery with a real audience still runs longer than rehearsal.
- Draft target (advanced): the word count that fills 90% of the slot after pauses, the professional's margin, because a speech that finishes slightly early has no recorded exceptions to being well received. Without a slot entered, it shows the slot this speech needs.
- Silent reading time (advanced): how long the same text takes to read on the page at the average adult speed of about 238 wpm, which is why a script that "reads fine" is usually too long to speak.
- Audience adjustments: non-native-speaker audiences, technical content and anything the room must retain all argue for the slower end and shorter sentences, which are conveniently also easier to deliver.