Typing Test

Three numbers, and all three are worth writing out, because every typing site defines them slightly differently and players compare scores across sites.

• Gross WPM = (characters typed ÷ 5) ÷ minutes. Every keystroke counts, spaces included, right or wrong.
• Net WPM = gross WPM − (errors ÷ minutes). One error costs one whole word.
• Accuracy = correct characters ÷ characters typed.

An error is any character that does not match the word it was typed into, plus any character of a word you left short before pressing space. Characters you never reached are not errors: if the clock stops while you are three letters into a six-letter word, the three you never typed cost you nothing. Nor does a mistake you notice and backspace — it costs you the time it took and nothing else, because accuracy is measured on the transcript standing at the end.

Read the bottom row twice. Ninety per cent accuracy sounds respectable and it halves your score, because on a one-minute test the arithmetic is exact: one wrong character is one word off your net WPM, so thirty wrong characters are thirty words gone.

The figure usually quoted for an average adult is around 40 words a minute, with practised office typists in the 60s and 70s. Above 100 is genuinely fast. The record is Barbara Blackburn, who sustained 150 WPM for fifty minutes and peaked at 212 WPM on a Dvorak keyboard — a useful reminder that the ceiling is much higher than most people's plateau, and that the plateau is usually accuracy rather than finger speed.

What a WPM figure actually means in ordinary words is less obvious than it looks, because a "word" is five characters and the words on this screen average 5.05 characters plus the space that ends them. So a score in words per minute is always a little higher than the number of real words you typed:

Sixty WPM is about 50 dictionary words a minute and five keystrokes a second, sustained. That is the number to quote if you quote one, and it should come from the 60-second test — not the 15-second one, which flatters everybody.

Because there is no standard, only conventions, and sites pick different ones. Four differences account for almost all of the gap:

• How errors are charged. Subtracting one word per error, as here, is five times harsher than the other common formula, net WPM = correct characters ÷ 5 ÷ minutes, which charges a fifth of a word for the same mistake. Five typos in a minute: 55 WPM here, 59 there.
• Whether spaces count. A space is a keystroke and it is counted here. A site that counts letters only reports roughly 17% less, because one word in six characters is a space.
• When the clock starts. Starting it when the page renders rather than on the first keystroke quietly charges you for reading the first line.
• How hard the words are. Two to six letters of common English is faster to type than prose with punctuation, capitals and numbers in it — and much faster than a passage of quoted text.

None of that makes any one site wrong. It does mean a WPM figure is only comparable with another figure from the same test, which is the argument for the 50-word run: everybody types the same 50 words, so two scores are measuring the same thing.

Fix it, the moment you notice it. The arithmetic is not close. One wrong character costs exactly one word of net WPM — five characters' worth. Correcting the character you have just typed costs two keystrokes, a backspace and a retype, which is 0.4 of a word. Correcting is two and a half times cheaper than leaving it.

Once you have pressed space the sum turns over. Going back costs one keystroke to step into the word, then a backspace and a retype for every character from the mistake to the end, and the space again. A wrong last letter on a six-letter word is four keystrokes — still under the five a missed character costs you. A wrong first letter is fourteen, and is not worth going back for. That is also why backspace here steps into the previous word only when that word was wrong, and never into one you typed correctly: the useful correction stays available and the wasteful one is not offered.

From the site's own common-word list: 9,828 words of two to six letters, the familiar end of a public-domain English dictionary, after the family filter has taken 109 of them out. There are no passages, no quotations and no copyrighted text anywhere in this game — a word stream is generated, not excerpted, which is also why it never repeats a sentence you have already practised.

The stream is a pure function of a test number, so the same number is the same words on any device, forever. That is what Again does: it replays the identical stream, which is the only honest way to tell whether you got faster or the words got easier. It is also why a test can be shared — the link carries the number, and whoever opens it types exactly what you typed.

Word length is capped at six deliberately, because a dictionary is not shaped like English. Sixty-one per cent of the full list, before that cap, is seven letters or longer, so dealing all of it would put the average word at 7.3 characters instead of 5.05 — and the five-character word that every WPM figure in the world is built on would stop being true of the words on the screen. The cap is what keeps the convention honest.