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Typing Speed Test

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Type the passage, and the clock starts with your first keystroke rather than when the page loaded. You get net words per minute — the figure that counts your mistakes against you — alongside gross speed, accuracy and characters per minute. Nothing is recorded: there is no account, no leaderboard and no score kept after you close the tab.

Type this

The best way to get faster at typing is to stop looking down at your hands. It feels slower at first, and it is, for about a week. After that your fingers start to know where the keys are, and the part of your mind that was spent finding them is free to think about what you actually want to say.

Backspace works — correcting a mistake removes it from the error count. Pasting is blocked, since it would report a speed nobody typed.

60sWaiting for your first keystroke0 / 296 characters

How to use the typing speed test

  1. 1Pick a passage and a time limit.
  2. 2Click into the typing box and start. The timer begins on your first keystroke.
  3. 3Correct mistakes with backspace if you want — a corrected character stops counting as an error.
  4. 4Read the result when the time runs out or the passage is finished.

Examples

A clean run

Input
300 characters typed in 60 seconds with no mistakes
Result
60 gross WPM, 60 net WPM, 100% accuracy, 300 CPM

300 characters is 60 words, because a word here is five characters.

Fast but inaccurate

Input
450 characters in 60 seconds, 36 of them left wrong
Result
90 gross WPM, 54 net WPM, 92% accuracy

The gap between the two numbers is the whole reason net WPM exists.

About the typing speed test

What the numbers mean in practice

Around 40 words per minute is the figure usually quoted for an adult who types regularly but has never been taught. Formal training tends to put people in the 50 to 70 range, and transcription and data-entry roles often ask for 60 to 80 with high accuracy. Past 100 is unusual and is nearly always someone who touch-types without thinking about it at all.

Those are reference points rather than measurements of anything, and a single one-minute test is a noisy sample of them. Speed on a familiar passage in a quiet room is not speed on unfamiliar text with someone talking to you, and the honest use of a number from a test like this is comparing it to your own number from last month.

Accuracy is the part worth practising

It is tempting to chase the gross figure, because it moves quickly when you push. It is also the wrong thing to train: mistakes cost more than the keystroke that made them, since they have to be found and fixed later, and typing fast with errors builds the habit of typing fast with errors.

The usual advice from typing instructors is to slow down until accuracy is consistently above 97%, then let speed come back on its own. It does, and it comes back with the accuracy still attached. The net figure on this page is designed to make that trade visible: pushing speed at the cost of accuracy moves the two numbers in opposite directions.

Why the passages differ

The common-words passage stays inside the vocabulary most typing courses drill, so it measures raw finger speed on familiar patterns. The punctuation passage is deliberately heavy on the shifted keys — quotation marks, colons, apostrophes, capitals mid-sentence — which is where most people's speed collapses without their noticing.

The numbers passage exists for the same reason: the top row is the least practised part of the keyboard for anyone who does not do data entry, and a test that avoids it flatters most typists. The code passage adds brackets, semicolons and symbols in the density a programmer actually meets. Comparing your speed across the four says more than any single figure does.

Frequently asked questions

What counts as a word?
Five characters, spaces included. It has meant that since the typing schools of the 1920s, and the reason is fairness: counting real words would score the same typist differently on “a an the” than on “characteristically”, which says more about the passage than about the person typing it.
What is the difference between gross and net WPM?
Gross is how fast the keys moved: every character typed, divided by five, divided by the minutes. Net subtracts one word per minute for each character left wrong at the end. Net is the figure a typing test means by “your speed”, because 90 gross at 88% accuracy is slower work in practice than 70 gross at 100% — the errors have to be fixed afterwards by someone.
Does correcting a mistake still count against me?
No. The scoring compares what is in the box against the passage when the clock stops, so a character you fixed with backspace is simply correct. It costs you time rather than accuracy, which is exactly the trade-off real typing involves.
Why did one dropped letter mark the rest of the line wrong?
Because the comparison is position by position, which is the standard for a copy test and the only definition that can be scored while you type. A missed character shifts everything after it out of alignment. Backspacing to the mistake fixes the alignment and the score; it is also why net WPM, rather than the raw error count, is the number worth watching.
Is my typing recorded anywhere?
No. What you type stays in the page, the score is computed in the browser, and nothing is transmitted, saved or associated with you — there is no account and no history, so a result you want to keep has to be copied before you close the tab. Note that the site itself serves ads, which set cookies like any ad-supported site; that is described in the privacy policy and is unrelated to what you type here.

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