Typing Speed Test

In typing, a 'word' means five characters, counting the space. The convention is older than computers. It exists so that your speed does not depend on whether the passage happens to use long words.

Gross speed counts every character you typed. Net speed takes off the mistakes you left behind.

The gap between the two is the interesting part. A run at 70 gross with 92 per cent accuracy lands near 60 net. The 60 is the number that predicts how long a real document takes, because every error left in is a fix someone makes later. Sites that headline gross speed and bury accuracy are measuring how fast you can hit keys. That is a different skill.

Most tests use lists of random common words, and those inflate scores. You never have to type a capital letter, a comma, or a word you did not see coming.

Real sentences have punctuation, capitals and the odd unusual word. All of them slow you down, and they slow you down at work too.

The passages here come from out-of-copyright prose. They carry no digits and no odd symbols, so the test does not turn into a number-pad exercise by accident. Each run picks a different passage. The text scrolls rather than turning pages, because a page break adds a pause that has nothing to do with typing.

Salthouse showed that experts are barely faster at any single keystroke. What they do better is overlap them. Their hand is already moving towards the next key while the current one is still going down. Skilled typists also read further ahead in the text than beginners do.

That explains two surprises. Your speed on random word lists says little about your speed on real sentences. Reading ahead gives you nothing when the next word is unpredictable. And drilling single letters does almost nothing, while practising on real text does a great deal.

Dhakal and colleagues studied 136 million keystrokes. The two habits that went with speed most strongly were overlapping keys and simply using more fingers.

Around 42 net words per minute sits in the middle of the reference distribution. Professional typists work well above 65. The average typing speed page breaks down what different figures actually mean.

If you want the number to rise, chase accuracy first and speed second. Adding speed to accurate typing is easy. Adding accuracy to fast typing means unlearning a movement, which is not.

Typing is also the most transferable skill measured anywhere on this site. Getting better here shows up in every hour you spend at a keyboard. The memory tasks in the memory hub cannot claim that, and how working memory works explains why.