How Many Words Are in a 20 Minute Speech?

Answer: At a typical speaking pace of 130 words per minute, a 20 minute speech will be about 2,600 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 twenty minute speech uses about 2,500 to 3,000 words.

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 LengthSlow (100 wpm)Average (130 wpm)Fast (160 wpm)
1 minute100 words130 words160 words
5 minutes500 words650 words800 words
10 minutes1,000 words1,300 words1,600 words
15 minutes1,500 words1,950 words2,400 words
20 minutes2,000 words2,600 words3,200 words
25 minutes2,500 words3,250 words4,000 words
30 minutes3,000 words3,900 words4,800 words
45 minutes4,500 words5,850 words7,200 words
60 minutes6,000 words7,800 words9,600 words
120 minutes12,000 words15,600 words19,200 words


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