The Return of Sherlock Holmes

This text as typing material

Length

141 words

Characters

816

At 40 WPM

245 s

Letters per word

4.7

Shift presses

9

Punctuation marks

12

816 characters count as 163 exam words, so 40 WPM finishes it in about 245 seconds and 60 WPM in 163. Its words run 4.7 letters long, 66% of its letters need a finger to leave the home row, and it asks for 9 capitals and 12 punctuation marks (commas, periods). The longest word is “overwhelmingly”, and the less common letters K, Q, V, X all appear. Among the 111 texts here it comes out harder than 18 of them and easier than 92 — gentle going, by word length, punctuation and reaches together.

Public domain: The Return of Sherlock Holmes was first published in 1905, 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 #108, source file pinned at SHA-256 8c4de14b3a19. Project Gutenberg's own header, footer and trademark are not reproduced.

Where to go next

• Arthur Conan Doyle · 1892

  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

  Same author

• G. K. Chesterton · 1911

  The Innocence of Father Brown

  One step harder

• Abraham Lincoln · 1863

  The Gettysburg Address

  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.