How long does it take to read The Odyssey?
by Homer
9h 55m
148,775 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 3 weeks.
That is 20 sessions with The Odyssey.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 2 weeks.
How we worked this out
The Odyssey is about 148,775 words, estimated from its 541 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 9 hours 55 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 The Odyssey, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
The Odyssey at a glance
- Pages
- 541
- Author
- Homer
- 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 The Odyssey alongside each other, one session at a time.
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