Practice texts·demanding going
Babbitt
Sinclair Lewis, 1922. Type the passage exactly as written — capitals and punctuation count.
- Gross WPM
- 0
- Accuracy
- 0%
- Wrong words left in
- 0
- Keystrokes / hour
- 0
- Time
- 0 s
This text as typing material
- Length
- 105 words
- Characters
- 687
- At 40 WPM
- 206 s
- Letters per word
- 5.4
- Shift presses
- 7
- Punctuation marks
- 20
687 characters count as 137 exam words, so 40 WPM finishes it in about 206 seconds and 60 WPM in 137. Its words run 5.4 letters long, 67% of its letters need a finger to leave the home row, and it asks for 7 capitals and 20 punctuation marks (semicolons, commas, periods, hyphens, colons). The longest word is “office-buildings”, and the less common letters K, Q, V, Z all appear. Among the 111 texts here it comes out harder than 96 of them and easier than 14 — demanding going, by word length, punctuation and reaches together.
Public domain: Babbitt was first published in 1922, and everything published in the United States before 1930 is in the public domain there. The passage is cut by script from Project Gutenberg ebook #1156, source file pinned at SHA-256 735c608e3a22. Project Gutenberg's own header, footer and trademark are not reproduced.
Where to go next
Sinclair Lewis · 1920
Main Street
Same author
Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1850
The Scarlet Letter
One step harder
Leo Tolstoy · 1869
War and Peace
A gentler one
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.
Key drills
A drill for each row, hand, finger and kind of character — and how much of English prose each set of keys actually carries.
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.