Free typing speed test: your WPM in one minute
A free one-minute typing test reporting net words per minute and character accuracy. Runs in your browser with no signup, and nothing you type leaves it.
One minute on a passage drawn at random from 10. A five second countdown runs first, so put your hands on the keys before you press start.
Nothing you type leaves your browser. Your score stays on this page unless you choose to make a result page for it afterwards.
How the test runs
A five second countdown, then sixty seconds of typing. The countdown is there because a clock that starts on the first keystroke starts the measurement at the moment you are least ready, and charges you for every hesitation after it while the ones before it were free.
The passage is one of ten, drawn at random, and a retake never gives you the one you just typed. That is the whole reason there are ten: a second run on the same words measures how much of it you remembered.
Ten passages only produce comparable results if the passages are alike, so the rule they satisfy is published rather than asserted. Every one of them is between 1,100 and 1,300 characters, has a mean word length between 4.15 and 4.55 letters, is at least 80 per cent words of six letters or fewer, and contains no digits and no punctuation beyond the comma and the full stop. A script in the repository checks all four before a passage ships.
Each passage is also long enough that the minute runs out before the words do, at any speed a person types. The single 290 character passage this test launched with did not clear that bar: anybody above about eighty words a minute reached the end in roughly thirty-five seconds, and was scored on a third of a minute.
What this test measures
Sustained speed and accuracy on ordinary prose, over one minute. That is a narrower thing than “typing ability”, and the gap matters if you are preparing for a job that involves a keyboard.
Prose typing is the easiest case: the words are predictable, your fingers fall into familiar patterns, and autocorrect habits help rather than hurt. Real work is often harder. Entering account numbers, codes or names gives you none of that predictability, and most people are meaningfully slower at it.
How to read your result
- Net WPM is the headline number. Here it is correctly matched characters divided by five, divided by minutes elapsed, rounded to a whole number. Uncorrected characters earn no credit.
- Accuracy is the percentage of characters that matched. Anything below about 95 percent is worth working on before speed.
- Gross WPM is shown for comparison. If gross is far above net, errors are your limiting factor, not speed.
One run is a noisy measurement. Take it three times and use the middle result. The passage changes each time, which is what makes the second and third runs worth anything.
If you are practising for a job test
Employer typing tests differ from this one in ways that will affect your score:
- They are often longer. Speed at five minutes is lower than speed at one minute, because concentration is the real constraint.
- They may use forms or numbers, not prose. Practise the kind of content the job involves.
- Some penalise corrections, some do not. Ask which, because it changes the right strategy completely.
- The keyboard will not be yours. Practise on a keyboard you dislike at least once.
If you are hiring
A typing number on its own rarely decides anything. What usually matters is accuracy on the specific format the job uses, sustained for longer than a minute, under light time pressure. A one-minute prose test does not measure that, and an unsupervised one measures it even less.
The data entry accuracy test is the version built for hiring: supervised timing, realistic material, and scoring that separates speed from accuracy so you can see which one is the constraint. This one-minute prose test is the practice version, free for anyone, with no account and no result sent to an employer, and the free 10-key test is the same thing for a numeric keypad.