How long should a eulogy be?

• One of several speakers: three minutes. Around 380 to 400 words.
• The main eulogy, with others also speaking: four to five minutes. Around 500 to 650 words.
• The only person speaking: five to seven minutes. Around 650 to 900 words.
• Almost never longer than ten minutes, whoever you are.

Before you write, ask the funeral director, celebrant or officiant what you have been allotted. It is one message and it removes all the guesswork. They will have a schedule, and they would far rather tell you now than manage the overrun on the day.

Most articles convert minutes to words at 150 words per minute. That figure is real — it is roughly the average conversational rate for English speakers — but it describes someone calm, talking normally, in an ordinary room.

That is not the situation you will be in. At a funeral:

• You will pause. Sometimes for several seconds, sometimes because you have to. Pauses are not padding — they are most of what makes a eulogy bearable to listen to — but they consume the clock.
• You will slow down. Almost everyone does when their voice is unsteady, and it is the right instinct.
• You may need to stop entirely and restart a paragraph.
• There is often a lectern, a microphone with a delay, or a room with an echo, all of which push you slower still.

A realistic planning figure is 130 words per minute, and the safest approach is to write to that and finish early. Nobody in the history of funerals has been annoyed that a eulogy ended a minute sooner than expected.

The only reliable test is to stand up and read the whole thing out loud, at full speaking volume, with a timer running. Not in your head. Silent reading runs at something like twice speaking pace and will tell you a five minute eulogy is two and a half.

Do it twice. The first read is always faster than the real thing because you are rushing to get through it. The second read, once you know where the difficult paragraphs are, is closer to the truth — and it is the one where you will find the sentences you cannot say without stopping.

Add fifteen to twenty seconds to whatever your timer says. That is the walk to the lectern, arranging your pages, and the breath you will take before the first sentence.

Almost every first draft runs long. Cut in this order, because it removes the least valuable material first and protects the parts that are doing the real work.

1. Scene-setting before a story. “It was the summer of 2003, and we had driven down on the Friday because the Saturday was booked up…” Start the story where it actually starts. This alone often saves a minute.
2. Second examples of the same point. If you have three stories that all show she was generous, keep the best one whole rather than three in miniature.
3. Lists of roles. “She was a mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, neighbour and friend.” The room knows. It costs ten seconds and adds nothing.
4. Biography that is in the order of service. Dates, places of birth, job titles. If it is printed in the booklet, you do not need to say it.
5. Quotations and poems. A borrowed passage is almost always the weakest thirty seconds. Yours is better than Tennyson’s here, because yours knew them.
6. The second ending. Many drafts finish, then carry on for another paragraph. Find the line that genuinely lands and stop there.

What not to cut: the specific details. The broken zip, the phrase they always said, the thing they did every Thursday. Those are the eulogy. Everything else is packaging.

This is where services overrun, and it is almost always for the same reason: nobody coordinated, so four people each told the room who the deceased was before getting to their own material.

• Agree who covers what. One person on childhood and family, one on working life, one on friendship. Overlap is the enemy of a schedule.
• Only the first speaker needs to set the scene. Everyone after can begin in their own story.
• Assume three minutes each, and tell each other honestly. Four speakers at three minutes plus movement between them is already fifteen minutes of the service.

A little, and it is worth knowing which room you are in.

• Crematorium services are the tightest. Slots are frequently 20 to 45 minutes including entry, music and committal, with another family waiting. Keep to what you were told.
• Church funerals usually have room for a single longer eulogy, but the liturgy takes priority and the eulogy is often placed in a fixed slot. Ask the priest or minister.
• Celebrations of life and memorial services are the most flexible, often with several short tributes of two to three minutes each rather than one long one.
• Graveside is short by nature — people are standing, often in weather. Two to three minutes is plenty.

Our step-by-step guide to writing a eulogy walks through the whole thing in six steps, from a blank page to something you can say out loud. How to start a eulogy collects sixteen opening lines and the four openings to avoid. How to end a eulogy covers eighteen ways to close, and the second-ending problem that spoils most drafts. Our collection of eulogy examples has six complete eulogies in different voices and lengths.