Three Men in a Boat

This text as typing material

Length

146 words

Characters

767

At 40 WPM

230 s

Letters per word

4.1

Shift presses

15

Punctuation marks

25

767 characters count as 153 exam words, so 40 WPM finishes it in about 230 seconds and 60 WPM in 153. Its words run 4.1 letters long, 65% of its letters need a finger to leave the home row, and it asks for 15 capitals and 25 punctuation marks (hyphens, commas, periods, semicolons). The longest word is “extraordinary”, and the less common letters J, K, Q, V, X all appear. Among the 111 texts here it comes out harder than 51 of them and easier than 59 — ordinary going, by word length, punctuation and reaches together.

Public domain: Three Men in a Boat was first published in 1889, 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 #308, source file pinned at SHA-256 96f8a59418b8. Project Gutenberg's own header, footer and trademark are not reproduced.

Where to go next

• Franz Kafka · 1915

  Metamorphosis

  One step harder

• F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925

  The Great Gatsby

  A gentler one

• Jane Austen · 1813

  Pride and Prejudice

  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.

• 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.