How long does it take to read Lord of the Flies?
by William Golding
3h 20m
50,050 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 7 days.
That is 7 sessions with Lord of the Flies.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 5 days.
How we worked this out
Lord of the Flies is about 50,050 words, estimated from its 182 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 3 hours 20 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 Lord of the Flies, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
Lord of the Flies at a glance
- Pages
- 182
- Author
- William Golding
- 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 Lord of the Flies alongside each other, one session at a time.
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