How Many Words Are in a Two Hour Speech?

Answer: At a typical speaking pace of 130 words per minute, a two hour long speech will be about 15,600 words. Hopefully the only time you have to give one of these speeches is if you’re a college professor! That’s almost a sixth of a novel’s word count.

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 two hour long speech uses about 15,000 to 18,000 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: