How Many Words Are in a 2 Hours Long Speech?

Answer: At the normal speaking rate of 130 words per minute (wpm), a 2 hours long speech will have about 15,600 words.

Read more: How to Write a Speech

Speech and publication coach Daphne Gray-Grant found that, on average, people speak at a rate of 125 to 150 wpm so a 2 hours long speech uses between 15,000 to 18,000 words.

You can use our word counter tool to see how long on average your text will take to speak.

How can you measure your spoken words per minute?

To quickly know what your speaking rate is, write a 650-word essay and then get out a stopwatch. Time how long it takes you to speak all of the words in the essay.

Once you’ve finished, divide the word count (650 words) by the number of minutes in decimals (30 seconds = 0.5 minutes) and you’ll get an estimate of your words per minute speaking rate.

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

To quickly find out how many words a typical speaking length requires, see the table below. You can quickly map word counts to typical speaking rates:

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
2 hours12,000 words15,600 words19,200 words
3 hours »« 1 hours