How fast do you type? Test your WPM and accuracy in 30, 60, or 120 seconds.
Typing speed is measured in words per minute (WPM), where one "word" is standardised as five characters (including spaces). This standardisation prevents the result from being inflated by typing many short words or deflated by a few long ones.
The average person who learned to type naturally — hunting and pecking or self-taught — types around 35–40 WPM. A trained touch typist who can type without looking at the keyboard typically reaches 55–80 WPM. Professional typists and transcriptionists — people whose job involves typing all day — typically reach 80–120 WPM. The world record for sustained typing speed is over 200 WPM.
Most office workers plateau at their natural speed early in their careers and do not improve significantly without deliberate practice. The improvement ceiling is usually around 60–70 WPM without a change in technique.
The research on deliberate typing practice is consistent: the primary bottleneck for most people is not finger movement speed but the habit of looking at the keyboard. Touch typing — typing without looking down — requires building motor memory for each key's position until it becomes automatic. This transition takes most people 20–40 hours of deliberate practice to establish and several months to consolidate.
The second bottleneck is using all fingers. Most self-taught typists use a subset of fingers and compensate with speed. Proper touch typing uses all ten fingers on the home row (ASDF and JKL;) and distributes the workload across both hands. The initial slowdown from switching technique is discouraging but temporary.
Accuracy above 98% is considered optimal for professional typing. Below 95%, the time cost of backspacing and correcting errors begins to cancel out speed gains from typing faster. The fastest typists are not necessarily the most accurate — they simply type fast enough that small error rates are acceptable for their use cases.
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