5 minute typing test
300 seconds on the clock. It starts when you press the first key.
- Gross WPM
- 0
- Accuracy
- 0%
- Wrong words left in
- 0
- Keystrokes / hour
- 0
- Time
- 0 s
What 5 minutes of typing looks like
- At 30 WPM you type
- 150 words
- At 40 WPM (office average)
- 200 words
- At 60 WPM
- 300 words
- Keystrokes at 40 WPM
- 1,000
- One wrong word costs
- 0.20 net WPM
The length many clerical and data-entry exams are set at. Five minutes is long enough that posture and breathing start to show up in the result, which is the point of it. One uncorrected wrong word takes 0.20 WPM off the net result of a 5 minute test, so accuracy barely moves the number and speed is all that is left.
Other lengths
How the score is worked out
A “word” is five keystrokes, spaces included — the convention typing exams use, so that long and short words count fairly.
- Gross WPM = everything you typed ÷ 5 ÷ minutes.
- Net WPM = gross minus one for every wrong word you left in, per minute. This is the number exams and employers ask for.
- Accuracy = correct keystrokes ÷ all keystrokes. A mistake you went back and fixed no longer costs speed, but it still costs accuracy.
- Keystrokes per hour (KPH) is the same speed in the unit data-entry jobs and some government exams quote.
Keep going
Typing lessons
Fifteen short lessons, two new keys at a time, with the keyboard showing which finger goes where.
Practice texts
Type a passage from a classic book: real sentences, capitals and punctuation, with the numbers that say how hard each one is.
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.