what is the fastest possible reading speed? (depending on eye movement and ability to take in information fast enough)

Question: what is the fastest possible reading speed? (depending on eye movement and ability to take in information fast enough)
- Keywords:
  book,
  eye,
  reading,
  sense,
  sight
Asked by kaurprincess to James, Marcus, Martin, Rob, Suzanne on 19 Mar 2012.
- Suzanne McEndoo answered on 19 Mar 2012:
  
  Some people are able to read up to a few thousand words per minute, but the pay off is that they only understand about half of what they’re reading (which is still quite impressive).
  
  If you’re reading to understand something, you’re probably reading about 2 to 4 hundred words per minute. If you skim you can probably get a few hundred higher than that.
- Marcus Gallagher-Jones answered on 20 Mar 2012:
  
  As you correctly pointed out in your question it depends on what criteria you apply. Simply passing your eyes over words then you could get through several thousand in a minute I would think the current record is around 4000 a minute though how much useful information you’d get out of it is beyond me.

kaurprincess commented on 19 Mar 2012:

thanks!
i just realised i can roughly work out the rate at which i read…
it comes out at about 7cm (7-10 words) per second
I guess I’m slightly above average =)

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Question: what is the fastest possible reading speed? (depending on eye movement and ability to take in information fast enough)