Typing speed test

About 40 words a minute is average for someone comfortable with a keyboard. Around 65 to 75 is a quick office typist. Above 90 is genuinely fast, and above 120 is rare enough that most people who claim it are quoting a burst rather than a sustained minute.

For jobs that ask, transcription and data entry usually want 60 or more with high accuracy. Most other roles that mention typing don't test it.

A word is five characters

Not an actual word. Typing speed has been measured in five character units, including the space, since long before computers, and the reason is that real words vary wildly in length. Counting real words would mean a passage of short words scored higher than the same effort spent on long ones.

So a minute spent typing 300 characters is 60 words a minute regardless of what those characters were. That's what makes scores comparable between one test and another.

If a test tells you a number wildly different from everywhere else, check whether it's counting actual words. Some do, and those scores can't be compared with anything.

Net and raw

Raw speed counts every character you typed. Net speed counts only the ones that matched. The gap between them is your accuracy, and it's the more useful number of the two.

Somebody typing 90 raw at 85 percent accuracy is slower in practice than somebody typing 65 at 99 percent, because every error has to be found and fixed, and finding it costs more than the keystroke did. In real work, the correcting is the expensive part.

If your accuracy is below about 95 percent, slowing down will make you faster. That sounds like advice from a poster, and it's arithmetic: at 90 percent you're making an error every ten characters, and each one costs several keystrokes and a break in your attention.

Why your score varies between tests

The words. Tests drawn from the most common few hundred English words score higher than tests using ordinary prose, because common words are short and your hands already know them. This one uses common words, so treat it as the optimistic end of your range.

Punctuation and capitals. Adding them drops most people by 10 to 20 percent. A test without them isn't measuring the typing you actually do.

Length. Fifteen seconds flatters you. Anyone can sprint. Sixty seconds is the standard, and two minutes is where stamina starts showing.

The keyboard. Switching between a laptop and an external keyboard is worth several words a minute in either direction until your hands adjust.

Getting faster

The thing that helps most is not looking down. If you're hunting for keys, no amount of practice at speed fixes it, because you're practising the hunting. Covering your hands feels awful for about a week and then it doesn't.

Second is consistency over intensity. Ten minutes a day beats an hour on Sunday, because this is motor memory and motor memory is built by repetition spaced out over time.

Third, practise the things you get wrong rather than the things you get right. Most people have a handful of letter pairs their fingers fumble every time. Ten minutes on those is worth an hour of general practice.

Progress is slow and then it isn't. People typically sit at a number for weeks and then jump, which is normal and worth expecting so you don't give up in the flat part.

About the best score here

It's kept in your browser on this device only. It isn't sent anywhere, there's no account, and clearing your browser data clears it.

Pasting is blocked, which is worth mentioning only because the first thing anybody tests is whether they can. A pasted passage scores several hundred words a minute and the only person it fools is the one who did it, but it would sit in the best score forever.