Speeches

How long should a best man speech be?

Three to five minutes. At the pace people speak in a room, that is roughly 400 to 700 words, or about a page and a half of large print. Everything below is the reasoning, so you can adjust it for your own wedding instead of taking a number on faith.

The arithmetic

Most people speak at about 130 to 150 words a minute in front of a room. That is slower than reading aloud at a desk, because a room adds pauses you do not plan: waiting for a laugh, waiting for glasses to go down, waiting for the couple to stop looking at each other. So the conversion is simple. Three minutes is around 400 to 450 words. Five minutes is around 650 to 700. A speech that runs 1,000 words on the page is a seven-to-eight-minute speech in the room, whatever it felt like in your kitchen.

Word count is the honest measure, and it is why a speech I write has the count and the estimated minutes printed at the end. Minutes lie depending on nerves. Words do not.

Why the short end wins

Nobody has ever left a wedding saying the best man was too brief. The speech usually lands between dinner and dancing, when the room has been sitting for an hour and there are often two or three other speakers on the list. Your audience's patience is shared among all of you.

A short speech also concentrates what you have. Two well-told stories in four minutes beat five stories in eight, because every story past the second is competing with the ones before it. The cut material is not wasted; it makes what stays feel chosen.

There is a floor as well. Under two minutes reads as reluctance, as if you stood up because you had to. Two stories, a sincere line about the couple, and a toast will carry you past it without padding.

What to cut first

When a draft runs long, the cuts come in this order. The second example of any point you make twice. The backstory a stranger in row ten does not need to follow the story. The apology for not being a speaker, which no speech needs. The joke you are least sure of. And any greeting longer than one sentence; the room knows who you are, or is about to.

Keep the specific detail and cut the general praise. “He drove four hours in the rain to help me move a sofa” survives every edit. “He is the most generous person I know” is the kind of line that vanishes from memory while it is still being said.

How to time it properly

Read it aloud, standing, with a phone timer, at the pace you would talk to a table of guests. Your silent-reading time is not information; most people read silently at twice their speaking pace. If the read-aloud comes in over five minutes, cut words rather than speeding up, because nerves will speed you up on the day anyway, and a rushed speech loses the pauses where the laughs live.

If there are several speakers, it is worth one text to whoever is running the day to ask how many. Three speakers at five minutes each is a quarter of an hour of speeches, and the later you are in the order, the more the room will thank you for brevity.

The one-line answer

Aim at four minutes, write 500 to 600 words, and let it be a good four minutes rather than an average seven. Once it is written, delivery is its own subject, and there is a free one-page sheet on how to deliver a speech covering pace, pauses, hands, and the toast.

And if the length is fine but the words will not come, that is the part I do: custom speeches written from your own stories, at the length you choose, in 48 hours, with one revision included.