30-second typing test

You get 30 seconds and a passage of ordinary English words. There are no proper nouns, no capitals and no punctuation in it, which is deliberate: those are the parts of a typing test that measure your keyboard layout and your familiarity with a particular name rather than your typing. The vocabulary sits in the same common-word tier that standard online typing tests use, so the number you get here is broadly comparable to one from monkeytype or typingtest.com.

The score is words per minute, where a "word" is the standard five characters including the space — that convention is what lets two people on different texts compare results at all. Accuracy is counted alongside it, and it matters more than the headline number: a 70 WPM run at 88% accuracy is slower in practice than a 60 WPM run at 99%, because everything you mistyped has to be fixed. We explain the arithmetic in how WPM is measured.

Typical adult typing speed lands somewhere around 40 WPM. Around 60 is comfortably above average and fast enough that typing stops getting in the way of thinking, which is the point at which most people stop noticing their own hands. Past 80 you're in genuinely quick company, and the people who go further than that are usually touch typists who've put deliberate hours in rather than naturally fast people. If you're below 40, that's simply where most people start — it moves faster than you'd expect once you practise on purpose. What that climb actually looks like is laid out in how long it takes to reach 60 WPM.

Thirty seconds is long enough to sample your typing and too short to be a verdict on it. A single run swings by ten WPM or more depending on whether your hands were warm, whether you'd read the first line before the clock started, and how you happened to recover from your first mistake. Run it three or four times and use the middle result rather than your best one — that's the number that will still be true tomorrow. There's more on what a short test can and can't tell you in what a 30-second typing test really tells you.

We use it to recommend songs that match your speed, which is the reason the test exists. Typing to music is harder than typing a static passage, because the pace is set by the song instead of by you, so a song near your measured WPM will feel like a fair fight and one well above it will feel like sprinting. From there, the useful next steps are a warm-up routine before you practise, and a look at how to improve typing speed if you want the practice to actually compound. Browse the song catalogue when you're ready to start.