Typing speed test — measure your WPM and accuracy

How to use the typing speed test

1. Choose a Test length: 30 seconds, 1 minute or 2 minutes.
2. Read the passage, then click the typing box and start. The timer starts on your first keystroke.
3. Type the passage exactly, including capitals and punctuation. Correct characters turn one colour and mistakes another, and a caret shows where you are.
4. The test stops when time runs out or when you finish the passage. Your Net speed, gross WPM, accuracy and errors appear.
5. Press Try again, pick a New passage, or choose Use my own text to practise with something else.

What it does and when to use it

The test measures how fast and how accurately you type a short passage. Use it to check your speed before a job application that asks for a WPM figure, to track progress while learning to touch-type, to compare a new keyboard with your old one, or for a friendly race with friends or classmates.

The built-in passages are plain, everyday English written for this tool. With your own text you can practise the words you really use, such as code, names or terms from your field.

For other quick tools that run in the browser, the stopwatch times anything you like, and the countdown timer is handy for timed practice sessions. If you are writing essays, the essay word counter keeps an eye on length.

How it works

The page compares what you have typed with the passage, one character at a time, and updates the colours as you go. At the end it calculates:

• Gross WPM = (characters typed ÷ 5) ÷ minutes
• Errors = characters that do not match the passage at the same position
• Net WPM = gross WPM − errors ÷ minutes (never below 0)
• Accuracy = correct characters ÷ characters typed × 100

Minutes come from the time between your first keystroke and the end of the test. Everything runs in your browser and nothing is recorded or sent.

Worked examples

These scores come from the tool’s own scoring function.

A 30-second attempt with typos. Typing 133 characters of the library passage in 30 seconds, with 3 characters wrong (“Saturdyas” and “studemts”), gives a gross speed of 53.2 WPM. Each error costs 2 WPM in a half-minute test, so net WPM is 47.2. Accuracy is 97.74% and 72% of the passage was completed.

A short, perfect line. Typing “The quick brown fox” (19 characters) with no errors in 6 seconds gives 38 WPM gross and net, with 100% accuracy.

Limits and tips

• A skipped or extra character shifts everything after it, so the rest of the line counts as errors until you fix it. Backspace to the mistake and carry on.
• Short tests are noisy. A 30-second result can vary a lot between attempts; a 2-minute test gives a steadier figure.
• Phones and tablets work, but on-screen keyboards and autocorrect make scores hard to compare with a physical keyboard.
• Look at the passage, not your hands. Accuracy first; speed follows with practice.