How to play

Click the words (or tap them on a phone) and start typing. The timer starts on your first key. Press space to move to the next word. A mistake turns the letter red; Backspace fixes it, and Backspace on an empty word goes back to the previous one if it has a mistake.

• Classic: type common words for 15, 30, 60 or 120 seconds. Switch on punctuation or numbers for a harder test.
• Excerpt race: type a whole passage, from the Gettysburg Address to Sherlock Holmes, as fast as you can. The clock runs from your first key to the last character, and your best is saved for each passage.
• Daily: one excerpt a day, the same for everyone. Keep a streak going and share your time.
• Memorize: learn a speech, poem or anything you paste in. You type it four times, each with less help: the full text, then with gaps, then first letters only, then from memory. Parts you get wrong come back until they stick, and texts you’ve learned come back for review after 1, 3, 7, 14, 30 and 60 days.

Shortcuts: Tab starts a new test, Esc resets the current one, and Enter works like a space (handy at the end of a line of a poem).

What the numbers mean

• WPM (words per minute) counts five characters as a word, spaces included, and only counts words you typed correctly.
• Raw counts every key you pressed, mistakes too.
• Accuracy is the share of keys that matched the text.
• Consistency shows how steady your speed was from second to second. 100% is perfectly even.

Tips

• Accuracy first. Speed follows once your fingers stop correcting themselves.
• Look at the next word, not your hands, and keep a steady rhythm rather than bursts.
• Short daily practice beats one long session. The Daily excerpt takes about a minute.

Questions

What’s a good typing speed? Many people type around 40 WPM. 60 is quick, and 100 or more is very fast. Your best test is the one you take next week compared with today.

Do curly quotes and dashes count? No need to hunt for them. Texts are straightened to plain quotes and hyphens, and if your phone types a curly quote it counts as the plain one.

Where do my texts go? Nowhere. Texts you paste in, your bests and your Memorize progress are saved only in this browser. Your own texts never go on a leaderboard.

Where are the passages from? They’re all in the public domain: US founding documents, Shakespeare, Kipling, Frost, Poe, the King James Bible, Sun Tzu, Aesop, Lewis Carroll and Arthur Conan Doyle. Sources are listed on the about page.