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Typing Test - Words Per Minute & Accuracy
How many words can you type in 60 seconds?
About the Typing Test
The typing test measures your typing speed in words per minute (WPM) and how accurately you type under time pressure. A stream of common English words appears; type each one and press space to move to the next. You have 60 seconds — your WPM is based on correctly typed characters, so speed without accuracy will not score well.
How to play
- Press Start. A row of common words appears, with the current word highlighted.
- Type the highlighted word, then press space to move to the next one.
- Keep typing for 60 seconds — mistakes are marked but do not stop you.
- Your score is words per minute (WPM), based on correct characters typed.
What it measures
This test focuses on your typing speed and keyboard accuracy. The average typist reaches about 40 WPM. Touch typists commonly reach 60–80 WPM, and professional typists can exceed 100 WPM.
Why play it
- A clean, repeatable benchmark of typing speed and accuracy
- Uses ordinary words, not gibberish, so it reflects real typing conditions
- Quick enough for a daily warm-up before study, coding or writing sessions
Did you know?
- The average person types around 40 words per minute; professional typists often exceed 65–75 WPM.
- Touch typing — not looking at the keys — is the single biggest lever for speed gains.
- The world record for typing speed is well over 200 WPM, set on a QWERTY keyboard in short bursts.
- Accuracy tends to plateau before speed does — most people can type faster than they think once they stop worrying about mistakes.
What counts as a good score?
Ranges below are drawn from published research — sources are listed at the end of the page.
| Level | Words per minute (WPM) | What it means |
| Developing | Under 30 WPM | Typically hunt-and-peck typing. This is the band where learning touch typing pays back fastest. |
| Average | 30–50 WPM | Where most everyday computer users sit — comfortable, but still watching the keyboard some of the time. |
| Above average | 50–75 WPM | Confident touch typing. Around this speed typing stops being the bottleneck on writing. |
| Fast | 75–100 WPM | Professional-typist territory. Sustaining it with high accuracy is the harder half. |
| Exceptional | 100+ WPM | Rare. Competitive typists exceed 150 WPM, and the recognised record on an electric typewriter stands at 216 WPM. |
WPM is standardised as five keystrokes per word including spaces, so speeds are comparable across tests. Large-scale keystroke research by Dhakal et al. (2018), covering 168,000 typists, found an average of around 52 WPM among volunteer participants; general-population averages are usually quoted lower, around 40 WPM.
What a "word" means here
WPM uses a fixed convention: one word is five keystrokes including spaces and punctuation. Without it, typing "cat cat cat" would score far higher than typing "extraordinarily", and no two tests would agree. The standard is why a WPM figure means the same thing across sites.
Net WPM — the number worth caring about — subtracts errors. A test reporting raw WPM without accuracy is easy to game and tells you very little about how fast you actually produce usable text.
The QWERTY question
QWERTY was designed for mechanical typewriters, not for speed, and Dvorak and Colemak both look better on paper. Studies of experienced typists switching layouts generally find modest gains at best — nothing like the retraining cost. The Dhakal study's finding is more useful: the strongest predictors of speed are how many fingers you use and how much you overlap keystrokes, not which layout you learned.