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.
| # | Text | Year | Words | Letters / word | At 40 WPM | Going |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Secret Adversary Agatha Christie | 1922 | 121 | 4.0 | 200 s | demanding ✓ |
| 2 | The Prisoner of Zenda Anthony Hope | 1894 | 103 | 4.4 | 182 s | demanding ✓ |
| 3 | Howards End E. M. Forster | 1910 | 107 | 4.0 | 173 s | demanding ✓ |
| 4 | Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe | 1852 | 51 | 4.9 | 95 s | demanding ✓ |
| 5 | The Hound of the Baskervilles Arthur Conan Doyle | 1902 | 116 | 4.4 | 199 s | demanding ✓ |
| 6 | Persuasion Jane Austen | 1817 | 70 | 4.6 | 124 s | demanding ✓ |
| 7 | A Room with a View E. M. Forster | 1908 | 171 | 4.2 | 281 s | demanding ✓ |
| 8 | Middlemarch George Eliot | 1871 | 138 | 4.5 | 236 s | demanding ✓ |
| 9 | Around the World in Eighty Days Jules Verne | 1872 | 101 | 4.5 | 176 s | demanding ✓ |
| 10 | Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Jules Verne | 1870 | 109 | 5.3 | 214 s | demanding ✓ |
| 11 | Common Sense Thomas Paine | 1776 | 56 | 4.4 | 93 s | demanding ✓ |
| 12 | Little Women Louisa May Alcott | 1868 | 94 | 4.4 | 159 s | demanding ✓ |
| 13 | A Journey to the Centre of the Earth Jules Verne | 1864 | 146 | 4.6 | 254 s | demanding ✓ |
| 14 | The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne | 1850 | 136 | 4.7 | 241 s | demanding ✓ |
| 15 | Babbitt Sinclair Lewis | 1922 | 105 | 5.4 | 206 s | demanding ✓ |
| 16 | War and Peace Leo Tolstoy | 1869 | 168 | 4.2 | 272 s | demanding ✓ |
| 17 | Great Expectations Charles Dickens | 1861 | 153 | 4.4 | 257 s | demanding ✓ |
| 18 | Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte | 1847 | 114 | 4.7 | 201 s | demanding ✓ |
| 19 | This Side of Paradise F. Scott Fitzgerald | 1920 | 146 | 4.9 | 267 s | demanding ✓ |
| 20 | The Happy Prince Oscar Wilde | 1888 | 121 | 4.3 | 200 s | demanding ✓ |
| 21 | A Study in Scarlet Arthur Conan Doyle | 1887 | 128 | 4.5 | 218 s | demanding ✓ |
| 22 | The Souls of Black Folk W. E. B. Du Bois | 1903 | 123 | 4.4 | 206 s | demanding ✓ |
| 23 | Flatland Edwin A. Abbott | 1884 | 117 | 4.4 | 197 s | demanding ✓ |
| 24 | Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe | 1719 | 103 | 4.3 | 171 s | demanding ✓ |
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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