How long does it take to read 1776?
by David McCullough
7h 5m
106,150 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 2 weeks.
That is 14 sessions with 1776.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 10 days.
How we worked this out
1776 is about 106,150 words, estimated from its 386 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 7 hours 5 minutes.
Most reading-time sites default to 300 words a minute. The best evidence we could find, a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies by Marc Brysbaert, puts silent adult reading of English prose closer to 238 words a minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. We use 250. It is slower than the number you will see elsewhere, and it is closer to how people actually read.
This is still a model, not a measurement. When enough ReadersGuild readers have finished 1776, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
1776 at a glance
- Pages
- 386
- Author
- David McCullough
- Genre
- history, historical fiction, biography
Knowing the number is the easy part.
The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read 1776 alongside each other, one session at a time.
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