Key drills
Pick the keys you want to work on. Every drill is generated from that key set, and each page says how much of written English those keys actually carry.
Each colour is one finger. The marked keys — A S D F and J K L ; — are home: every reach starts and ends there.
By row
The four rows, in the order a touch typist learns them.
Home row
A S D F G H J K L ;
34.6% of English letters
Top row
Q W E R T Y U I O P
50.8% of English letters
Bottom row
Z X C V B N M
14.6% of English letters
Number row
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
a reach, not a letter set
By hand
Words one hand can type alone — the left has more of them, which is a fact about English.
Left hand
Q W E R T A S D F G Z X C V B
58.0% of English letters
Right hand
Y U I O P H J K L N M
42.0% of English letters
By finger
Real words that lean on the keys one finger owns.
Left little finger
A Q Z
8.3% of English letters
Left ring finger
S W X
8.8% of English letters
Left middle finger
C D E
19.4% of English letters
Left index finger
B F G R T V
21.5% of English letters
Right index finger
H J M N U Y
21.0% of English letters
Right middle finger
I K
7.7% of English letters
Right ring finger
L O
11.6% of English letters
Right little finger
P
1.6% of English letters
By kind of character
Capitals, punctuation, numbers and symbols: everything a test of bare lower-case words never asks for.
Capitals
Shift on every word
a reach, not a letter set
Punctuation
, . ; : ' " ? ! -
a reach, not a letter set
Numbers in text
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
a reach, not a letter set
Symbols
! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ + { } | : " < > ? ~
a reach, not a letter set
One page per key
Every key has its own page as well — the finger that owns it, how often it is really pressed, and the pairs it turns up in. The keyboard map lists all 32 of them.
Questions
Which drill should I do first?
The home row, then the top row, then the bottom row. Once all three feel automatic, the drills that pay best are capitals and punctuation, because almost nobody practises the Shift reach and it costs more speed than any single letter.
Why are the finger drills made of whole words and not letter groups?
Because three or four letters cannot spell enough real words to fill a drill, but plenty of real words lean heavily on them. Each finger drill takes the words that use its keys most, so one finger does most of the work while the rest of the hand stays honest.
Where do the frequency numbers come from?
They are counted, not quoted: every letter of the 111 public-domain books behind the practice texts on this site — 51,993,314 letters in total. Each page prints the count and the sample size next to the percentage so you can see what it is a percentage of.
Keep going
Typing test
Gross and net WPM, accuracy and keystrokes per hour — the figures typing exams use, at eight lengths from 15 seconds to 15 minutes.
Typing lessons
Fifteen short lessons, two new keys at a time, with the keyboard showing which finger goes where.
Practice texts
Type a passage from a classic book: real sentences, capitals and punctuation, with the numbers that say how hard each one is.
Every key
One page per key: the finger that owns it, how often it is really pressed, and the letter pairs it lives in.
Typing speed
What a speed means in characters, keystrokes per hour and minutes per page — and a test paced to the number you are aiming at.
Weak keys
A drill built from the keys you miss most, worked out from your own tests.
Times tables
Each table with its patterns, a drill that returns to what you got wrong, and a 60-second speed test.