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.

Touch typing finger positions

Touch typing means each finger owns its own keys, and your hands always return to a resting position. That position is the home row: left fingers on A, S, D, F and right fingers on J, K, L and the semicolon. Feel your keyboard and you will find small bumps on F and J — they are there so your index fingers can find home without looking.

From the home row, each finger moves up and down its own column. The left index finger covers F, G, R, T, V and B; the right index covers J, H, U, Y, N and M. Thumbs are only for the space bar. It sounds rigid, but that rigidity is what lets your hands stop thinking, and speed comes from not thinking.

If you are used to two or four fingers, switching will feel slow for a week or two. Practise fifteen minutes a day on real text rather than random letters, and measure your progress once a week in Typing Sprint.

What counts as a good typing speed?

For a sense of scale, these are the ranges commonly used as rough benchmarks for English text.

• Under 30 WPM: still hunting for keys, usually while looking at the keyboard.
• 30 to 45 WPM: typical for someone who types every day.
• 45 to 65 WPM: fast and comfortable for almost any office job.
• 65 to 90 WPM: on a par with professional typists.
• Over 100 WPM: competition level, usually the result of years of practice.

Typing fast on a phone

Touch screens change the rules a little. Most people are fastest with two thumbs, and accuracy matters even more, because fixing typos on a phone is much slower than on a keyboard. Word prediction and swipe typing can help a lot, but they can also slip in the wrong word without you noticing.

In practice: hold the phone in both hands, make the keyboard bigger if the keys feel cramped, and watch the word forming rather than your thumbs. As on a physical keyboard, a steady rhythm beats bursts of speed followed by lots of corrections.

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.