What this typing test measures
The test shows how fast and how accurately you type: you copy a random English or German text for 15, 30, 60 or 120 seconds. Afterwards you get net and gross WPM, characters per minute, your accuracy and the keys you miss most often. The clock starts with your first keystroke, and everything is calculated locally in your browser.
How is typing speed calculated?
The usual unit is words per minute (WPM), where one word stands for five characters including spaces. The formula is characters ÷ 5 ÷ minutes. An example over 60 seconds: at the end there are 260 characters in the field, 6 of them wrong.
| Measure | What counts | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Gross WPM | all 260 characters | 52 |
| Net WPM | only the 254 correct ones | 50.8 |
| Characters per minute | the 254 correct characters | 254 |
Accuracy is the share of keystrokes that were right when you typed them. Every typed character counts, including one you retype after Backspace: typing “ab” as a, x, Backspace, b means three characters typed, two of them right, so about 67%. An error you fix with Backspace lowers accuracy but not the net score, which is why the result lists corrected errors and errors left in separately.
What is a good typing speed?
The largest public comparison comes from a study by Aalto University and the University of Cambridge (Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson, Oulasvirta: “Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes”, CHI 2018). 168,960 volunteers each copied 15 short English sentences:
| Range in the study | WPM | Characters per minute |
|---|---|---|
| slowest 10% | below about 26 | below about 130 |
| average | 51.56 | about 258 |
| fastest 10% | above about 78 | above about 390 |
The study computes WPM the way the gross value is computed here: length of the typed text ÷ 5 ÷ minutes. Its participants came through an English-language typing test site, and 98% typed on QWERTY. With German text, capitalised nouns and umlauts the comparison is only a rough guide. On smartphones, a follow-up study with 37,370 participants measured an average of 36.2 WPM (Palin et al., MobileHCI 2019).
How do I convert WPM to characters per minute?
Multiply by five: 40 WPM equal 200 characters per minute, 60 WPM are 300. German speakers usually state typing speed as “Anschläge pro Minute” (keystrokes per minute), English speakers as WPM. This test counts every correct character as one keystroke and makes no deductions for errors. If you are preparing for a specific typing assessment, check how it scores mistakes.
Do umlauts and capital letters count twice?
No. A “Ü” is one character, even though it needs Shift. You will still feel the difference: German text needs Shift for every noun, and on a US keyboard each ä, ö, ü and ß costs a key combination. The German QWERTZ layout has its own keys for all four. An umlaut that arrives as a letter plus a combining diaeresis counts as a single character.
How does the test work?
- Choose the duration and the text language; optionally add punctuation (capitals at sentence starts, commas, full stops, question and exclamation marks) and numbers up to 9999.
- Click or tap the text and start typing. The clock starts with your first character.
- Wrong characters turn red and underlined, corrected ones get a dotted underline. From the third line on, the text scrolls up.
- Press Tab, then Enter, to start a new text.
Pasting is blocked, otherwise the test would measure your clipboard. On a phone, tapping the text opens the keyboard; if it replaces a whole word despite autocorrect being off, that counts as deleting and retyping. Each word list holds just under 400 everyday words, without names.
Privacy
What you type never leaves your device and is not stored. Your browser's local storage keeps only your best net WPM per combination of language, duration and options.