How the typing test works
Pick a length, then start typing: the clock starts with your first key. Press Space after each word. A word you got wrong is underlined in red; press Backspace on an empty word to go back and fix it. When time runs out you get your speed, accuracy, a chart of your speed second by second and the keys you missed most.
The words are drawn at random from the 1000 most common English words, counted in news and Wikipedia text by the Leipzig Corpora Collection. Top 200 is the easier list; Top 1000 adds longer and less common words. Punctuation adds capitals, commas and full stops, and Numbers mixes in figures, which is closer to the text you type at work.
How WPM and accuracy are calculated
Typing speed is counted in standard words of five characters, spaces included, so a long word counts for more than a short one. Only correctly typed words count towards your WPM. Raw WPM counts every character you typed, mistakes included.
Example: in one minute you type 52 words correctly, 260 characters with their spaces. 260 divided by 5 is 52 WPM. If you also typed 4 wrong words of 30 characters, your raw WPM is 290 divided by 5, which is 58.
Accuracy is the share of key presses that were right. A wrong letter you fix with Backspace still counts as a mistake, because it cost you time.
What is a good typing speed?
The largest public study, run by Aalto University with the University of Cambridge and published at CHI 2018, recorded 136 million keystrokes from 168,000 volunteers. The average was 52 WPM. Trained typists of the 1970s and 1980s typically reached 60 to 90 WPM, and the fastest volunteers in the study typed about 120 WPM.
The same study found that faster typists make fewer mistakes, and that the fastest pressed 40 to 70 percent of their keys before letting go of the previous one. That overlap is called rollover, and this test measures yours when you type on a physical keyboard. Rollover also depends on your keyboard: check how many keys yours can report at once with the keyboard tester.
1, 3 or 5 minutes?
- 30 seconds and 1 minute measure your top speed. Good for warming up and for tracking progress.
- 3 minutes shows the pace you can hold once the first burst wears off.
- 5 minutes is the length many job typing tests use, and it rewards accuracy over bursts.
How to type faster
- Keep your fingers on the home row. The small bumps on F and J let you find it without looking.
- Go for accuracy first. Every mistake costs a Backspace and a retype, so a clean run is usually the fastest one.
- Practise your weak keys. After a test, Practise these keys builds the next test from words that contain the letters you missed most.
- Look at the screen, not the keys. Speed comes when your fingers know the positions on their own.
- Short, regular sessions work better than one long one. Compare against your own best, which this page keeps for each setting.
Typing practice in other languages
Every keyboard on this site has a Typing practice button: lines of the most common words in that language, typed with that language's layout, with words per minute and accuracy. Hindi shows how to spell each word by sound, and Japanese drills the kana with their romaji. Try it in Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi, Thai, Nepali, Farsi, Kannada, German, Korean, Cyrillic, Marathi, Greek, Japanese, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian.
For a timed test in Hindi, with InScript or typing by sound, take the Hindi typing test.
Questions
How is words per minute calculated?
Every five characters count as one word, spaces included. This test adds up the characters of the words you typed correctly plus the space after each, divides by five and then by the minutes the test lasted.
What is the difference between WPM and raw WPM?
WPM counts only correctly typed words. Raw WPM counts every character you typed, mistakes included, so the gap between the two shows how much speed your mistakes cost.
What is an average typing speed?
In a 2018 study of 168,000 volunteers by Aalto University and the University of Cambridge, the average was 52 words per minute, and the fastest typists reached about 120.
Should I take the 1, 3 or 5 minute test?
One minute measures your top speed. Three and five minutes show the pace you can hold, which is closer to real writing, and they are the lengths job typing tests usually use.
Is my result saved or sent anywhere?
Your best result for each setting is kept in this browser only. What you type is never sent to this site or anyone else.
Word list: Leipzig Corpora Collection (eng_news_2023_30K and eng_wikipedia_2016_30K, CC BY 4.0), with offensive words removed using the LDNOOBW list (CC BY 4.0). Typing study: Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson and Oulasvirta, "Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes", CHI 2018; summary by the University of Cambridge.