Typing Speed Test
Measure your typing speed in WPM and accuracy with a timed passage test.
How to Use
- Choose a test duration: 1, 2, or 3 minutes.
- Click Start (or just start typing) to begin the timer.
- Type the passage shown — errors are highlighted in red.
- When time is up your WPM, accuracy, and error count are shown.
- Click Restart to try again with a fresh passage.
When to Use This
- Before a data-entry or transcription interview, run the hard passage to see how far numbers, symbols and punctuation drag your speed below your plain-prose figure.
- Students learning touch typing can keep the on-screen keyboard in view, since it lights each key as it is pressed and gives a reason not to look down.
- Anyone comparing two keyboards can run the same difficulty and duration on each, because the passage pool and the scoring rules stay identical between runs.
- Teachers running a lab session can put everyone on the same three-minute medium test and compare net WPM, which accounts for errors rather than raw speed.
Frequently Asked Questions
About This Tool
Typing tests do not actually count words. The convention, inherited from typewriter-era instruction, defines one word as five characters including the space that follows it, so a passage of long words and a passage of short ones score on the same scale. Gross WPM counts everything you typed; net WPM subtracts a penalty for mistakes, which is why two tests can report very different numbers for the same run.
This test draws a passage with Math.random() from three pools of five: plain sentences, text with figures and punctuation, and dense technical strings. A three-second countdown starts the clock, and the run lasts 1, 2, or 3 minutes. Gross WPM is characters typed divided by five, divided by elapsed minutes. Accuracy compares your text against the passage position by position. Net WPM is gross WPM minus errors per minute, floored at zero. All of it runs in the page.
Notes & Limits
- Errors are recounted from your current text on every keystroke, so a mistake you backspace and correct stops counting; tests that penalize every wrong keypress will score you lower.
- Elapsed time resolves only to whole seconds and anything under one second is treated as one, so the live WPM figure is wildly high in the opening moments and settles later.
- Nothing is stored, so reloading or closing the page clears the result and the tool keeps no run history, which leaves tracking progress across weeks to you.
- Each difficulty holds five passages, so repeated testing at one level means meeting the same text again, and familiarity will lift your score above a cold reading.