How to Actually Get Faster at Typing

What the number actually is

Words per minute is not counted in words. The standard defines a word as five characters, including the space, so "the cat sat" is about 2.4 words rather than 3. It is done this way because words vary in length, and counting them literally would make a passage of short words look faster than the same effort spent on long ones.

Only correct characters count. This matters more than it sounds: at speed, most people's raw keystroke rate is considerably higher than their score, and the whole gap is corrections.

The plateau at forty

Almost everyone who types regularly lands somewhere between 35 and 50 words per minute and stays there for years. The reason is that around forty is where you stop being limited by knowing where the keys are and start being limited by how you move between them.

Below forty, the fix is almost always the same: stop looking down. It feels slower for about a week and then it is permanently faster, because looking at the keyboard costs you a re-find of your position on every single glance.

Above forty, looking down is no longer the problem, and practising more of the same does very little. The gains come from somewhere else entirely.

What moves the number after that

Accuracy, not speed. A typo costs the keystroke, the backspace, the retype and the half-second of noticing — call it four keystrokes for one mistake. Typing five percent slower with half the errors is almost always a net gain, and it feels wrong the entire time you are doing it.

The second thing is chunking. Fast typists do not type "t-h-e", they type "the" as one motion, and the same goes for "-tion", "-ing" and other common endings. This builds on its own with practice, but you can speed it up by deliberately practising common words rather than random letters.

The third is rhythm. Most people type in bursts with pauses at word boundaries. An even pace is measurably faster than a fast-then-stop pattern, even when the fast bursts are very fast, because the pauses are where the time goes.

Practising the right thing

Random-word drills are fine for warming up and poor for improving, because they spread your practice evenly across every letter pair — including the ones you already type perfectly. Most of your errors are concentrated in a handful of specific transitions, and you probably already know which fingers are involved.

The faster route is to find your own bad pairs and drill those. Type for a minute, notice which words you fumbled, and then type those words twenty times each. It is boring and it works, which is true of most practice that works.

What does not help

Switching to a different keyboard layout. Dvorak and Colemak have real theoretical advantages and the research on retrained typists is underwhelming — the months of being slow rarely pay back for anyone who is not already at the ceiling.

Buying a mechanical keyboard. It is more pleasant, it is not faster after the first week. The same goes for switch type, which people will argue about at length without any of it showing up in a score.

Finally: test conditions matter more than people admit. Your best run is not your speed. Your average across ten runs is, and it is usually ten to fifteen percent lower than the number you remember getting.