How the test works
Click the input box and start typing the words shown above it. Press space to move to the next word. The timer starts on your first keystroke, not when the page loads, so there is no rush to begin.
Choose 15, 30, 60 or 120 seconds. Thirty is the standard for a quick check. Sixty or 120 gives a more reliable number, because short tests are heavily affected by which words happen to come up — a run of easy three-letter words can inflate a 15-second result by ten WPM.
What WPM actually measures
A "word" in typing measurement is defined as five characters including the following space, not an actual English word. This convention exists so that "cat" and "extraordinary" do not count the same. It has been the standard since mechanical typewriter testing and is what every typing test uses.
Two figures are shown. Raw WPM is everything you typed divided by time, errors included. Net WPM — the headline number — counts only correctly typed characters. The gap between them is your error cost. If raw is 70 and net is 52, you are typing fast and fixing a lot, which is usually slower overall than typing at 60 cleanly.
What is a good typing speed?
- Under 25 WPM — hunt-and-peck typing. This is the range where learning touch typing pays for itself within weeks.
- 25–40 WPM — the average for someone typing with a few fingers without looking too often. Most people who never formally learned sit here.
- 40–60 WPM — a solid average for regular computer users and the level most office roles implicitly expect.
- 60–80 WPM — above average. Comfortable for writing-heavy professional work; the keyboard has stopped being the bottleneck.
- 80–100 WPM — fast. The range of experienced transcriptionists and many programmers who have typed daily for years.
- Over 100 WPM — top few percent. Competitive typists exceed 150, and the highest verified sustained speeds on standard keyboards are around 200.
Accuracy matters more than speed
This is the single most useful thing to understand about typing. Every mistake costs you the keystroke that made it, the backspace, and the retype — three keystrokes' worth of time for one error, plus the interruption to your rhythm.
Typing at 80 WPM with 90% accuracy produces roughly the same finished output as typing at 65 WPM with 99% accuracy, and the second is far less tiring. If your accuracy is below 95%, the fastest route to a better score is to deliberately slow down until it is above 97%, then rebuild speed from there. Speed built on top of accuracy is stable; speed built on top of errors collapses under pressure.
How to actually get faster
Learn touch typing properly. Fingers rest on the home row — ASDF and JKL; — and each finger owns a fixed set of keys. Do not look at the keyboard. The first two weeks are slower than your current method and this is where most people give up. Push through: the ceiling on hunt-and-peck is around 40 WPM, while touch typing has no practical ceiling.
Practise in short sessions. Fifteen minutes daily beats two hours weekly by a wide margin. Motor learning consolidates during rest, so frequency matters more than duration.
Fix your specific problem keys. Everyone has them — commonly the number row, the letters under the weaker fingers, and capital letters requiring the opposite-hand shift. Pay attention to which words break your rhythm and drill those patterns specifically.
Check your posture. Wrists floating rather than resting, forearms roughly parallel to the floor, screen at eye level, elbows at about ninety degrees. This is comfort and injury prevention first, though it does also help sustained speed.
Type real text, not just tests. Word lists build raw finger speed. Actual writing — with punctuation, capitals and thinking — builds the speed that shows up in your work. Switch to the punctuation mode here for something closer to real conditions.
A note on the results
Nothing is stored, submitted or ranked. There is no account and no leaderboard, because a leaderboard requires knowing who you are. Take the test as often as you like; the variation between consecutive attempts is normally three to five WPM, so improvement below that is noise rather than progress.