Practice texts·ordinary going
The Prince
Niccolo Machiavelli, 1532. 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
- 118 words
- Characters
- 650
- At 40 WPM
- 195 s
- Letters per word
- 4.4
- Shift presses
- 10
- Punctuation marks
- 17
650 characters count as 130 exam words, so 40 WPM finishes it in about 195 seconds and 60 WPM in 130. Its words run 4.4 letters long, 69% of its letters need a finger to leave the home row, and it asks for 10 capitals and 17 punctuation marks (commas, periods, semicolons). The longest word is “principalities”, and the less common letters K, Q, V, X, Z all appear. Among the 111 texts here it comes out harder than 55 of them and easier than 55 — ordinary going, by word length, punctuation and reaches together.
Public domain: The Prince was first published in 1532, 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 #1232, source file pinned at SHA-256 33496a305f7a. Project Gutenberg's own header, footer and trademark are not reproduced.
Where to go next
Robert Louis Stevenson · 1883
Treasure Island
One step harder
Rudyard Kipling · 1894
The Jungle Book
A gentler one
Charles Darwin · 1859
On the Origin of Species
Next in the list
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.
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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.
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Each table with its patterns, a drill that returns to what you got wrong, and a 60-second speed test.