How long does it take to read Keywords?
Keywords by Raymond Williams takes about 5 hours 47 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 47 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1976. 315 pages, about 86,625 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 38 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 47 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 37 minutes |
The page count is the median across 22 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society is a book by the Welsh Marxist academic Raymond Williams published in 1976 by Croom Helm. Originally intended to be published along with the author's 1958 work Culture and Society, this work examines the history of more than a hundred words that are familiar and yet confusing: Art, Bureaucracy, Culture, Educated, Management, Masses, Nature, Originality, Radical, Society, Welfare, Work, and many others. The approach is cultural rather than etymological. Sometimes the origins of a word cast light on its meaning, but often one finds that it originally meant something quite different. Or that there has been a fierce political struggle over the 'correct' meaning. A revised and expanded edition of Keywords was published by Fontana in 1983. In 2005 Blackwell published New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, an attempt to update Williams' text.
Subjects: Anglais (Langue), Sociolinguistique, Sociolingüística, Woordgebruik, Etymology, Woorden