Practice texts·ordinary going
The Time Machine
H. G. Wells, 1895. 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
- 128 words
- Characters
- 742
- At 40 WPM
- 223 s
- Letters per word
- 4.6
- Shift presses
- 7
- Punctuation marks
- 20
742 characters count as 148 exam words, so 40 WPM finishes it in about 223 seconds and 60 WPM in 148. Its words run 4.6 letters long, 63% of its letters need a finger to leave the home row, and it asks for 7 capitals and 20 punctuation marks (parentheses, parentheses, periods, commas, hyphens). The longest word is “forefinger--as”, and the less common letters K, V, X, Z all appear. Among the 111 texts here it comes out harder than 43 of them and easier than 67 — ordinary going, by word length, punctuation and reaches together.
Public domain: The Time Machine was first published in 1895, 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 #35, source file pinned at SHA-256 2892e919000e. Project Gutenberg's own header, footer and trademark are not reproduced.
Where to go next
H. G. Wells · 1898
The War of the Worlds
Same author
Charlotte Perkins Gilman · 1892
The Yellow Wallpaper
One step harder
Mark Twain · 1876
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
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.