<P> Research done in 2012 measured the speed at which subjects read a text aloud , and found the average speed across 17 different languages to be 184 ± 29 WPM or 863 ± 234 CPM . However , for the languages that use the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets , the number of WPM varied , as low as 161 ± 18 for Finnish and as high as 228 ± 30 for English . The reason for this is different word structures in each language ( longer words in such languages as Finnish and shorter words in English ) . However , the number of characters per minute tends to be around 1000 for all the tested languages . For the tested Asian languages that use particular writing systems ( Arabic , Hebrew , Chinese , Japanese ) these numbers are lower . </P>
<P> Research done in 2012 measured the speed at which subjects read a text aloud , and found the average speed across 17 different languages to be 184 ± 29 WPM or 863 ± 234 CPM . However , for the languages that use the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets , the number of WPM varied , as low as 161 ± 18 for Finnish and as high as 228 ± 30 for English . The reason for this is different word structures in each language ( longer words in such languages as Finnish and shorter words in English ) . However , the number of characters per minute tends to be around 1000 for all the tested languages . For the tested Asian languages that use particular writing systems ( Arabic , Hebrew , Chinese , Japanese ) these numbers are lower . </P>
average number of words read in a minute
average number of words read in a minute
184 ± 29 WPM
184 ± 29 WPM