Practice texts·ordinary going
Main Street
Sinclair Lewis, 1920. 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
- 100 words
- Characters
- 570
- At 40 WPM
- 171 s
- Letters per word
- 4.5
- Shift presses
- 9
- Punctuation marks
- 16
570 characters count as 114 exam words, so 40 WPM finishes it in about 171 seconds and 60 WPM in 114. Its words run 4.5 letters long, 60% of its letters need a finger to leave the home row, and it asks for 9 capitals and 16 punctuation marks (hyphens, commas, periods, semicolons). The longest word is “wheat-lands”, and the less common letters K, Q, V, X, Z all appear. Among the 111 texts here it comes out harder than 53 of them and easier than 57 — ordinary going, by word length, punctuation and reaches together.
Public domain: Main Street was first published in 1920, 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 #543, source file pinned at SHA-256 68f2bcb2a8d1. Project Gutenberg's own header, footer and trademark are not reproduced.
Where to go next
Sinclair Lewis · 1922
Babbitt
Same author
Rudyard Kipling · 1894
The Jungle Book
One step harder
Franz Kafka · 1915
Metamorphosis
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.