Typing Speed Test

The test needs only a keyboard and takes as little as half a minute. A passage of about 40 to 50 words is chosen at random and shown above the typing box.

1. Choose a Test length: 60 seconds (the default), 30 seconds, 2 minutes or Whole passage. Changing it loads a fresh passage.
2. Click into the typing box and start. The timer begins at your first keystroke, so you can read ahead before you begin.
3. Follow the colours in the passage: correct letters change colour, mistakes get a red highlight, and the next character is marked. Capital letters and punctuation count.
4. Watch the live figures: Time, WPM (net), WPM (gross), Accuracy, Characters and Errors.
5. When the test ends, read your final line, for example the WPM, the accuracy and the seconds taken, and press Copy result to keep it.
6. Press New passage to try again. Pasting is blocked, so every character must be typed.

A "word" in typing tests is not a real word. It is a block of five characters, spaces and punctuation included, which stops long words from distorting the result. The page uses the same rules throughout:

• Gross WPM = characters typed divided by 5, divided by minutes elapsed.
• Net WPM = (characters typed divided by 5, minus the wrong characters currently in the box) divided by minutes elapsed.
• Accuracy = correct characters divided by characters typed, shown as a percentage.

A worked example: you type 240 characters in 60 seconds and 6 of them are still wrong. Gross WPM is 240 / 5 = 48. Net WPM is (48 - 6) / 1 = 42. Accuracy is 234 / 240 = 97.5 percent, which the page rounds to 98. Six uncorrected mistakes cost six words a minute, an eighth of your speed. A faster example: a 250-character passage typed in 45 seconds with 2 wrong characters gives gross 67, net 64 and accuracy 99 percent.

Two behaviours are worth knowing. Each character is compared with the same position in the passage, so if you skip a letter, everything after it turns red until you press Backspace and repair the gap. And because the score uses the text left in the box, a mistake you correct is not counted against you, though the extra keystrokes cost time.

Commonly quoted figures put the average adult at around 40 WPM, regular office typists at 50 to 60, and professional typists at 65 to 75, with 90 and above counted as fast. Treat them as rough guides, since they depend on the passage and the keyboard. Accuracy matters more than a few extra words: at 95 percent or better, speed gains come naturally, while a lower figure means you are losing time to corrections.

One limit of this test is passage length. Every passage is roughly 240 to 270 characters, about 50 words. If you type faster than about 50 WPM, the 60 second test ends when you finish the text, not when the clock does, and anyone above about 25 WPM will finish the 2 minute test early. The result still uses your actual time, so the figures remain valid, but it is a sprint, not a long-endurance test.

• Learn touch typing, with fingers on the home row and eyes on the screen.
• Slow down until accuracy is steady near 97 percent, then add speed.
• Practise in short daily sessions, using the Pomodoro timer to keep them regular.
• Record several runs and take their mean with the average calculator, because one lucky run says little.
• Check how long your own writing is with the word counter, or time yourself on it with the online stopwatch.

Common reasons for a disappointing score are easy to spot in the live figures. A burst of red after one slip means a skipped or extra letter has shifted everything behind it. A high gross WPM with a much lower net WPM means you are leaving errors in the text. A slow start usually comes from looking down at the keys, and an unexpected capital letter often means Caps Lock was on. The passages use ordinary capital letters and punctuation, so practise those as well as plain lower-case words.