How to use it
- Pick Common words and a length (15, 30, 60 or 120 seconds), or Book passage to type one sentence from a classic novel at your own pace.
- Start typing. The clock starts with your first key. Press Space after each word; if you notice a mistake in a word you already finished, Backspace takes you back into it.
- Read your speed, accuracy and raw speed, the count of correct, incorrect, extra and missed letters, and the second-by-second chart. Restart for a new set of words.
How it is scored
Typing speed is measured in words of five characters, spaces included, which is the convention in text-entry research, so a long word counts for more than a short one. The minutes run from your first keystroke to the end of the test.
- WPM counts the characters of the words you typed correctly, each with its space, plus the correct start of the word you are on, divided by 5 and by the minutes.
- Raw WPM counts every character you typed and kept, right or wrong.
- Accuracy is correct keystrokes divided by all keystrokes, counted as they happen, so a typo you erase still counts against it. Large typing studies usually report a different figure, the uncorrected error rate: the mistakes still left in the final text. That is why accuracy here is lower than “error-free” for anyone who types and fixes.
How fast is a good typing speed?
The largest published measurements come from online typing tests run by researchers at Aalto University and the University of Cambridge. In 2018, Dhakal and colleagues analysed 168,000 volunteers typing sentences on computer keyboards: the average was 51.56 WPM (standard deviation 20.2), the slowest 10% typed below about 26 WPM and the fastest 10% above about 78 WPM, and people who had taken a typing course were on average only about 5 WPM faster than those who had not. The uncorrected error rate averaged 1.17%. A 2019 study of 37,370 volunteers on phones (Palin and colleagues) found 36.2 WPM on average (standard deviation 13.2), with 75% of participants below 44 WPM.
Those studies had people copy whole sentences, and their WPM is the length of what was typed divided by five per minute from the first to the last keypress, which is close to this page’s raw WPM for a passage. Timed tests of common words usually come out faster than sentences because the words are short and need no Shift key or punctuation.
The words and passages
Common words mode draws at random from the 200 most frequent words in ten public-domain novels: A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll), Dracula (Bram Stoker), Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte), Moby-Dick (Herman Melville), Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain). Words that are mostly capitalised (names) were left out. They average 3.96 letters, so with its space a typical word is almost exactly one five-character “word”. Book passage mode uses 80 sentences of 18 to 40 words from the same books, kept with their capitals and punctuation; their words average 4.41 letters and 5.2% of their characters need Shift or are punctuation, so expect a lower score there. The list and the passages were extracted by a script, not by hand.
What we tested
On October 15, 2026: 2,000 random sequences (294,027 keystrokes with typos, erased mistakes, dropped and extra letters, autocorrect replacements and Backspace into a finished word) scored by the page's functions and by a separate Python implementation of the same definitions: 0 differences. Two broken versions were caught: counting every word as correct (1,999 sequences differed) and counting every keystroke as correct (2,000). In Chromium: typing a 175-character passage perfectly gave 305.7 WPM for 6.9 s (characters / 5 / minutes = 304.35) and 100.0% accuracy; a run with an erased typo and a dropped letter scored 98.3% accuracy, matching an independent keystroke count (119 of 121), with 1 missed character; a 15-second test fed phone-style input events (including an autocorrect replacement) stopped at 15.0 s with 48.8 WPM for 61 characters (expected 48.8); Backspace reopened a wrong word; switching mode mid-test left nothing behind (next passage 100.0%); 0 page errors and no sideways scrolling at 390 px.
Sources
- Vivek Dhakal, Anna Maria Feit, Per Ola Kristensson and Antti Oulasvirta, Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes, CHI 2018 (figures read from the paper).
- Kseniia Palin, Anna Maria Feit, Sunjun Kim, Per Ola Kristensson and Antti Oulasvirta, How do People Type on Mobile Devices? Observations from a Study with 37,000 Volunteers, MobileHCI 2019.
Frequently Asked Questions
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