The War of the Worlds

This text as typing material

Length

155 words

Characters

879

At 40 WPM

264 s

Letters per word

4.6

Shift presses

5

Punctuation marks

10

879 characters count as 176 exam words, so 40 WPM finishes it in about 264 seconds and 60 WPM in 176. Its words run 4.6 letters long, 67% of its letters need a finger to leave the home row, and it asks for 5 capitals and 10 punctuation marks (apostrophes, semicolons, commas, periods). The longest word is “intelligences”, and the less common letters K, V all appear. Among the 111 texts here it comes out harder than 5 of them and easier than 105 — gentle going, by word length, punctuation and reaches together.

Public domain: The War of the Worlds was first published in 1898, 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 #36, source file pinned at SHA-256 8417469e3ab6. Project Gutenberg's own header, footer and trademark are not reproduced.

Where to go next

• H. G. Wells · 1895

  The Time Machine

  Same author

• Edgar Rice Burroughs · 1912

  Tarzan of the Apes

  One step harder

• Leo Tolstoy · 1878

  Anna Karenina

  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.