Words to minutes calculator

Speeches run long in the room. Nerves speed people up in rehearsal, but pauses for laughs, applause and slides slow them down on the day. Write a 5 minute talk to about 650 words, not 750.

Short-form runs fast. A 60 second TikTok or Short usually carries 150 to 180 words, and creators using an AI voice often push past 180. If you are making those, our faceless video generator adds the voice and captions for you.

Audiobooks run steady. Narrators commonly work from about 9,000 to 9,600 words per finished hour, which is why a 90,000-word novel lands near 10 hours. For long documents, text to audiobook splits chapters automatically.

The spread is mostly about words, not speed. The German passage used 73 words where English used 78, but took 6 seconds longer to say, because German words are longer. Arabic and Korean join words and endings together, so each "word" carries more syllables and the per-minute count drops to about 100.

Linguists measure this in syllables instead. Pellegrino, Coupé and Marsico (2011) found read speech ranged from about 5.2 syllables per second in Mandarin to 7.8 in Japanese and Spanish, with English at 6.2, and that faster languages carry less information per syllable, so the same message takes a similar time. The practical rule: time every translation on its own. FreeTTS has 2,250+ voices in 149 languages if you need a native voice, and you can dub a video into another language with one.