Email Newsletter Read Time & Word Count Estimator

Word count and reading speed, multiplied into minutes

The sample body 'Welcome back. This week we shipped three calculators and one dull but useful changelog.' runs 14 words and 87 characters. At a 220 words-per-minute reading speed, that's roughly 0.06 minutes -- under 4 seconds, since a 14-word snippet is far shorter than a real newsletter issue.

220 WPM is a commonly cited average adult silent-reading speed, but actual reading speed for a promotional or informational newsletter (skimmed rather than read word-for-word) often runs faster than a novel or long-form article would be read at the same nominal WPM.

This scales linearly: a full newsletter issue at 10x this sample's word count would take roughly 10x as long to read, which makes word count the single lever that matters most once WPM is set to a reasonable estimate for your audience.

What this estimate doesn't account for

WPM is yours. Images and GIFs add time this page does not see. This counts only the words in the body text you paste in -- images, embedded GIFs, videos, and any linked content add real viewing time that a pure word-count formula can't capture, sometimes substantially for image-heavy newsletters.

Subject lines and preview text aren't part of this word count either, since they're read before the body opens and serve a different function (getting the open) rather than contributing to in-body read time.

Skimming behavior varies by reader and by how the newsletter is formatted -- a newsletter broken into short scannable sections with bold key phrases is typically skimmed faster than a comparable word count in dense paragraph form, even at the same WPM setting.

Related email and content-length tools

For podcast or video scripts instead of written newsletters, the Podcast Ad Script Word Count & Read Time Calculator applies the same word-count logic to spoken content.

If subject line risk (not read time) is the concern for this same email, the Email Subject Spam Score Checker covers that separately.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)