How long does it take to read Nineteen Eighty-Four?
by George Orwell
6h 13m
93,225 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 13 days.
That is 12 sessions with Nineteen Eighty-Four.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 9 days.
How we worked this out
Nineteen Eighty-Four is about 93,225 words, estimated from its 339 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 6 hours 13 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 Nineteen Eighty-Four, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
Nineteen Eighty-Four at a glance
- Pages
- 339
- Author
- George Orwell
- Genre
- fiction
Knowing the number is the easy part.
The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read Nineteen Eighty-Four alongside each other, one session at a time.
See who is reading right now