: "[x] minutes to read?" How do they calculate that? I've noticed a lot of platforms (blogs and such) list how long they estimate for a specific essay/post/article to take for the average reader.

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Medium divides the wordcount of a post by 275 words per minute. For images they count 12 seconds for the first image, 11 seconds for the second image, and minus an additional second for each subsequent image. Any images after the tenth image are counted at three seconds per image.

They emphasize that this is an estimation and that in the future, "we’d like to tailor it to your reading speed, account for the complexity of an article, and add support for other languages."

Google has registered a patent to calculate reading time for different sections of ebooks by measuring actual reading times of a sample of readers.

Psycholinguistics predicts reading time using complex grammatical models, data from eye tracking corpuses, and advanced statistical calculations.

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180 is the average number of words per minute a human reads.

Take the number of words and divide it by 180.

Here you go.

The average human should take 1 minute to read 180 words.

Some platforms may use different numbers, and platforms that track your actual reading pace (e.g. a Kindle device or app) might adjust themselves to your own average speed -- but this is the base; it really is that straightforward.

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