Typing Speed Test
Test your typing speed in WPM with live accuracy tracking — 30s, 1 min or 2 min tests.
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The Typing Speed Test times you on a short English passage and reports your speed in words per minute (WPM), your accuracy, the number of correct characters and your errors. You can run it for 30 seconds, 1 minute or 2 minutes, which suits a quick check before a data-entry job, a warm-up ahead of a government skill test, or tracking your practice over several weeks. The test runs entirely in the page and nothing you type is sent anywhere.
How a test runs
- Choose a Duration: 30 sec, 1 min (the default) or 2 min. Changing it resets the test.
- Read the passage. It is built from five practice sentences in random order, followed by the same five in reverse order, about 1,295 characters in all. New text reshuffles them.
- Start typing in the box below it. The clock starts on your first keystroke, so there is nothing to click first.
- As you type, correct characters in the passage turn green, wrong ones turn red and are underlined, and the next character to type is highlighted. The passage box shows about 450 characters at a time and scrolls forward with you, keeping roughly the last 150 typed characters in view, so even a fast typist on the 2-minute test always sees what comes next.
- The test ends when the timer reaches zero or when you finish the passage. Your WPM, accuracy, correct characters and errors then appear, with a Try again button.
Spell check, autocorrect and auto-capitalisation are switched off in the typing box, so phone keyboards should not quietly fix mistakes for you.
How your score is worked out
Typing tests count a "word" as five characters, spaces included, so long and short words are treated alike. This tool uses:
- WPM = (correct characters ÷ 5) ÷ minutes elapsed
- Accuracy = correct characters ÷ characters typed × 100
- Errors = characters in your final text that don't match the passage
Two details follow from this. Mistakes you fix with backspace are not counted as errors, though the time spent fixing them lowers your WPM. And the comparison is position by position: if you skip a letter or add an extra space, every character after it is shifted and shows red until you backspace to the slip and retype.
A real run, scored three ways
In a 30-second test we typed the first 150 characters of the passage with three wrong letters and left them uncorrected. The tool reported 147 correct characters, 3 errors, 98% accuracy and 59 WPM: 147 ÷ 5 = 29.4 words, and dividing by half a minute gives 58.8, rounded to 59. Here is the same run under the two common conventions:
| Measure | Formula | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Gross WPM | all characters ÷ 5 ÷ minutes | 60 |
| This tool | correct characters ÷ 5 ÷ minutes | 59 |
| Net WPM | gross WPM − errors ÷ minutes | 54 |
Under the net convention each uncorrected error costs a whole word; here it costs one character. If you are preparing for a test that penalises every mistake, treat the accuracy figure as the one to watch.
Government typing tests in India
The Staff Selection Commission's typing test for clerical posts asks for 35 WPM in English or 30 WPM in Hindi, which SSC expresses as 10,500 and 9,000 key depressions per hour on the basis of five key depressions per word. The passage runs for 10 minutes and is judged on accuracy. Other recruiters, from high courts to state commissions, set their own speeds, fonts and error rules, so the notification for your post is what counts.
This page's longest test is two minutes and in English only, so it measures short bursts. To build the stamina a 10-minute test needs, type a long passage into any text editor for ten minutes using a countdown timer, then count what you typed with the character counter. Characters ÷ 50 gives your gross WPM for the session: 1,900 characters works out to 38 WPM, enough for the English benchmark if your accuracy holds.
What counts as a good speed, and how to improve
A study by Aalto University and the University of Cambridge, based on 168,000 volunteers, found that most people typed between 30 and 60 WPM, with an average of 52 WPM and the fastest reaching about 120 (Aalto University summary). Those volunteers chose to take an online typing test and over 70% had done a touch-typing course, so they are not a random sample of computer users. The same research found that faster typists also tend to make fewer errors.
- Keep accuracy high before chasing speed; racing ahead and backspacing usually ends in a lower score than steady typing.
- Rest your fingers on the home row (the F and J keys have small bumps) and use all ten fingers.
- Keep your eyes on the passage rather than the keyboard.
- Practise in short daily sessions and compare results at the same duration and on the same device, because laptop, desktop and phone keyboards give quite different numbers.
Limits
The passage is built from five fixed English sentences, each used twice, containing only letters, spaces and full stops, so there are no digits, punctuation drills or capitals beyond sentence starts. Results are not saved between visits, so note them down if you are tracking progress. There is no Hindi, Krutidev or Inscript mode, and no 5- or 10-minute option.