Start typing and the test begins. When the clock runs out you get your words per minute, your accuracy, your error count and your position against typists worldwide. No sign-up, no download, nothing to install.
How this typing test works
The test presents ordinary text and measures what you do with it. There is no countdown before you begin: the clock starts on your first keystroke, so you can read the first line, settle your hands and start when you are ready. Every character you type is compared against the target as you go, and coloured immediately so you can see mistakes without hunting for them.
Everything is computed in your browser. No keystroke is sent anywhere, no server is involved in the measurement, and your results are stored only in your own browser. That has a practical consequence worth knowing: your history follows the browser, not you. Clearing your site data clears your results, and a different device starts from zero.
Backspace works exactly as it does anywhere else, and correcting a mistake removes it from your error count. What correcting a mistake does not do is erase it from your accuracy, because accuracy measures how often your fingers found the right key on the first attempt. That is the number that predicts how you will type when nobody is watching.
Choosing a test length
Short tests and long tests measure genuinely different things, which is why the site offers a range rather than one canonical duration. Fifteen seconds captures your burst speed, largely unaffected by stamina or concentration. Sixty seconds is the common standard and the one most external scores refer to, long enough that a lucky run of easy words cannot carry you.
Two and five minute tests measure something closer to real work. Concentration wanders, hands tire, and the gap between your burst speed and your sustainable speed becomes visible. Most people find their five-minute score sits noticeably below their fifteen-second one, and the size of that gap is itself useful information about what to practise.
- 15 seconds — burst speed, useful for a quick check
- 30 seconds — a fair balance of speed and consistency
- 60 seconds — the standard benchmark, best for comparison
- 2 minutes — where stamina starts to matter
- 5 minutes — closest to sustained real-world typing
Test modes
Plain prose exercises a surprisingly narrow part of your keyboard. The most common English words use a small set of letters in familiar combinations, and a typist can be genuinely quick at them while remaining slow at everything else. The alternative modes exist to find those gaps.
Numbers force you onto the top row, where most people are markedly slower and where a single wrong digit is a real error rather than a typo a reader can see past. Punctuation exercises the shifted keys and the reaches your fingers avoid. Code combines both with brackets, operators and symbols in dense sequences. Kids mode uses short, simple words for young typists. Multilingual mixes languages so you cannot settle into one rhythm.
- Normal words — the most common vocabulary in your chosen language
- Numbers — digits and numeric strings across the top row
- Punctuation — symbols, brackets and shifted characters
- Code — real snippets with brackets, operators and dense symbols
- Kids mode — short simple words suitable for children
- Multilingual — switches between languages within one test
Reading your result
The headline figure is net WPM: your gross speed minus the errors you left uncorrected. It is a deliberately unforgiving number, because usable output is what matters and text full of mistakes is not finished. Gross WPM appears beneath it so you can see the difference between raw pace and delivered work.
Accuracy, expressed as a percentage of keystrokes that landed correctly first time, is the figure to watch while you are improving. Consistency compares your speed across the run, and a low score there means you surged and stalled rather than holding a rhythm. The percentile places your net WPM in a distribution of typists.
One result is noise. Speed varies with fatigue, with the specific words you were dealt, and with how recently you last typed. Take several tests across several days before you decide what your speed actually is, and judge progress from the trend rather than from any single run.
Practising in your own language
The test ships word sets for English, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Indonesian, Korean and Vietnamese. Each is drawn from vocabulary that is genuinely common in that language rather than translated from an English list, because a translated list produces word frequencies no native speaker would recognise.
You can change language on any test without leaving the page. Bear in mind that scores are not directly comparable across languages: accented characters, word length and input methods differ enough that the same typist produces different numbers in different languages. Compare within one language, and mostly against your own history.