Practice texts

Hard typing practice texts

Ranked by word length, punctuation, capitals and reaches away from the home row — the four things that actually slow typing down. Words here average up to 5.4 letters.

#TextYearWordsLetters / wordAt 40 WPMGoing
1The Secret Adversary
Agatha Christie
19221214.0200 sdemanding
2The Prisoner of Zenda
Anthony Hope
18941034.4182 sdemanding
3Howards End
E. M. Forster
19101074.0173 sdemanding
4Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe
1852514.995 sdemanding
5The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle
19021164.4199 sdemanding
6Persuasion
Jane Austen
1817704.6124 sdemanding
7A Room with a View
E. M. Forster
19081714.2281 sdemanding
8Middlemarch
George Eliot
18711384.5236 sdemanding
9Around the World in Eighty Days
Jules Verne
18721014.5176 sdemanding
10Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Jules Verne
18701095.3214 sdemanding
11Common Sense
Thomas Paine
1776564.493 sdemanding
12Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
1868944.4159 sdemanding
13A Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Jules Verne
18641464.6254 sdemanding
14The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
18501364.7241 sdemanding
15Babbitt
Sinclair Lewis
19221055.4206 sdemanding
16War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
18691684.2272 sdemanding
17Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
18611534.4257 sdemanding
18Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte
18471144.7201 sdemanding
19This Side of Paradise
F. Scott Fitzgerald
19201464.9267 sdemanding
20The Happy Prince
Oscar Wilde
18881214.3200 sdemanding
21A Study in Scarlet
Arthur Conan Doyle
18871284.5218 sdemanding
22The Souls of Black Folk
W. E. B. Du Bois
19031234.4206 sdemanding
23Flatland
Edwin A. Abbott
18841174.4197 sdemanding
24Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe
17191034.3171 sdemanding

Sorted by that ranking, hardest first. It is a ranking within this corpus, not an absolute scale: the hardest text here asks for 56 punctuation marks and 34 capitals. The full list of 111 texts is on the practice texts page.

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