Typing speed

Average WPM and How It Is Measured

WPM — words per minute — is the standard unit of typing speed. Its “words” are not real words: in English, one WPM word is a standard unit of five characters, including spaces and punctuation.

How is a “Word” Defined for WPM?

Real words vary in length, so they are not used for measuring typing speed. Instead, WPM treats every 5 keystrokes as one “word”, including spaces and punctuation. Actual words and their boundaries do not matter — the total number of keystrokes is simply divided by 5:

The sentence “the quick, brown fox. Wow!” as twenty-six keystroke cells, with spaces shown as dots and punctuation highlighted, grouped into five-keystroke units that cut across word boundaries. — **IMG-1** — Letters, spaces and punctuation all count the same.

This is a widely used convention, but not a single universal standard. The convention most likely traces back to competitive typewriting.

In 1923, J. N. Kimball, a manager of the International World’s Championship Typewriting Contests, described designing2 test passages so that words would average five typewriter strokes each, making tests easier to compare and score.

Five is also close to the measured average length of an English word: 4.79 letters, according to Peter Norvig’s analysis3 of 743 billion words. This makes five a reasonable approximation for converting keystrokes into words per minute, although it does not establish the historical origin of the convention.

While the exact origin of the convention is not documented in a single definitive source, its use is well established across academic typing research and many popular typing tests and practice tools:

Research / Tool	Type	What it uses	Source
Arif & Stuerzlinger (2009)	Research	5 characters, spaces and punctuation included	Paper
Dhakal et al. (2018)	Research	“Any five characters”	Paper
Monkeytype	App	Characters ÷ 5	Source · Docs
TypingClub	App	5 characters per word	Methodology
Ratatype	App	5 characters per word	Methodology
keybr	App	CPM ÷ 5	Source

Gross and Net WPM

There are two common ways to calculate WPM: gross and net.

Gross WPM counts everything you type, including mistakes
Net WPM adjusts to the number of mistakes

The gross formula is well established, but net WPM is not calculated the same way by every tool, because there is no single rule for what counts as an error.

The same typed sentence scored twice, showing a word containing a typo counted toward gross WPM and excluded from net WPM. — **IMG-2** — One mistyped word counted two ways: it still adds to gross WPM, but drops out of net.

To give a few examples: Monkeytype counts only characters from correctly typed words, while TypingClub counts corrected mistakes as correct. Typing.com reports gross WPM and accuracy separately instead of calculating net WPM.

Why does this matter? A fast typist can get a high gross WPMby leaving mistakes behind, even though the final text needs more fixing.

A corrected mistake has already cost time through Backspace and retyping; an uncorrected mistake can make gross WPM look better without producing better text. Net WPM accounts for those remaining errors and therefore gives a better picture of usable typing speed.

What Counts as an Average WPM?

51.56 WPM is the average typing speed.

That figure comes from the largest published study of typing speed, but it needs some context.

The participants were self-selected visitors to a typing-practice website, not a representative sample of the general population. About two thirds were from the US and three quarters were between 11 and 30 years old. The authors note that this group is likely faster than the general population.1

The study measured English typing, so 51.56 WPM is an average for typing English, not for typing in general.

The average is also not the same as the midpoint. A small number of very fast typists pulls the mean upward, so about 50 WPM is closer to the speed of the person in the middle.

Where does your speed rank?

These benchmarks show how common different typing speeds are, from the middle of the distribution to the fastest typists.

one in two

faster than 50 WPM

50% of typists

The midpoint. Clear it and you are in the faster half.

one in twenty

faster than 85 WPM

5% of typists

Roughly one typist in twenty gets past this.

under one in a thousand

faster than 120 WPM

Less than 0.1% of typists

Close to the fastest speeds recorded anywhere.

Based on Typolo usage research and public sources.

How typing speed is distributed

The curve below shows the share of typists who type faster than each WPM level. As speed increases, the number of typists who reach it drops sharply.

IMG-3 — Share of typists faster than each speed. Based on Typolo usage research and public sources.

CPM and Languages Other Than English

The five-character “word” is an English-oriented measurement, built around English typing. Elsewhere it fits less well.

Languages such as German, Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish have longer words, so five characters cover a smaller share of a real one. Some languages also need more than one keystroke per character, which tests like 10FastFingers must account for explicitly.

Characters per minute (CPM) avoids the problem by counting characters directly:

WPM = CPM ÷ 5

The downside is familiarity. 250 CPM and 50 WPM are the same speed, but WPM is the number people recognise.

Sources

Dhakal, V., Feit, A. M., Kristensson, P. O., & Oulasvirta, A. (2018).Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes. CHI ’18, ACM. doi:10.1145/3173574.3174220
Edward, W. G. (1923). Improvement Curves in the Learning of Typewriting. Toronto: The Ryerson Press. Records how J. N. Kimball composed the championship test passages. archive.org
Norvig, P. (2012). English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited. Word lengths over 743 billion words of the Google Books Ngrams corpus. norvig.com/mayzner.html
Arif, A. S., & Stuerzlinger, W. (2009). Analysis of Text Entry Performance Metrics.IEEE Toronto International Conference (TIC-STH ’09), 100–105. doi:10.1109/TIC-STH.2009.5444533