Typing speed test — words per minute and accuracy
Words per minute and accuracy together. Fast with poor accuracy is slower in practice.
Measure your typing speed with no sign-up. See words per minute, accuracy and exactly where the errors land, with both short lines and longer passages.
Type the text below exactly. The clock starts on your first keystroke. Enter moves you to the next text.
What counts as a decent typing speed
For English, office typists generally land around 40–60 words per minute. Past 70 WPM, typing stops being the bottleneck in writing; below 30 you feel it in meeting notes and chat. But what actually sets your working pace is not peak speed — it is accuracy. Once the time spent deleting and retyping passes about a fifth of the session, your effective speed drops well under half the number on the screen.
Does a new keyboard really make you faster
Layout and actuation weight matter more than switch type. Going tenkeyless shortens the reach to your mouse and speeds up the whole workflow, and a weight that suits your hands means fewer errors over long sessions. Test two keyboards with the same text, three runs each. A single run varies too much to compare.
Measuring fairly
Same text, same time of day, same posture — otherwise there is nothing to compare. Throw the first run away as a warm-up and average the next three; that lands closest to your real ability.
Look at accuracy before speed
Two people at 60 WPM with 92% and 99% accuracy do not work at the same pace. Fixing one typo costs a backspace, a retype and a glance to confirm — several times the cost of typing one correct character. If your WPM went up and your writing did not get faster, accuracy is where to look. Gaining one or two points of accuracy is felt more than gaining ten WPM.
WPM is not comparable across languages
The convention in English is five characters to a word, which is why the number here is your character count divided by five. Languages with composed characters, Korean among them, are usually counted in raw keystrokes per minute instead, and those figures come out several times higher. Only compare within the same language and the same counting rule.
Posture changes the number
If your results jump around between runs, posture is usually why. Elbows behind your torso, or wrists pressed flat on the desk, shorten how far your fingers can travel and errors climb. Put the keyboard squarely in front of you and type with your wrists floating. Monitor height matters too — a low screen pulls your head down and rolls your shoulders forward, which changes your wrist angle whether you notice or not.
Practising so that it actually sticks
- Stop chasing speed and cut errors instead. Speed follows once accuracy is stable
- Write down the letter combinations you keep missing. It is usually three or four repeating patterns
- Five minutes a day beats an hour at the weekend — typing is muscle memory, so frequency wins
- Keep your eyes on the screen. Any habit of glancing down at the keys caps how fast you can get
Read next
If a key is not registering and skewing your result, check the whole board with the keyboard test first.
Frequently asked
My result changes a lot between runs.
A single run varies with how you happen to be feeling. Discard the first as a warm-up and average the next three. Comparison only means something with the same text, the same time of day and the same posture — and if the numbers keep jumping, posture is usually the cause.
Can I compare this against a keystrokes-per-minute score?
No, they are not the same measure. English WPM is conventionally your character count divided by five. Languages with composed characters are usually counted in raw keystrokes instead, which produces a much higher figure. Compare only within the same language and the same counting rule.
Will a new keyboard make me faster?
Layout and actuation weight matter more than switch type. Tenkeyless shortens the reach to your mouse and speeds up the whole workflow, and a weight that suits your hands reduces errors over long sessions. But accuracy affects real-world pace far more than peak speed does.