Question 1

What counts as a good typing speed?

Accepted Answer

The convention is that one 'word' equals five characters including spaces, so WPM is total characters divided by five, divided by minutes elapsed. The average adult types around 40 WPM. Touch typists who use the home row comfortably sit between 60 and 80 WPM. Professional transcriptionists and competitive typists routinely exceed 100 WPM, with the top of the leaderboard above 200. Anything above 40 WPM with 97% accuracy is functionally fast for office work. Raw speed without accuracy is meaningless — error correction costs more time than slower clean typing.

Question 2

How does DeviceCheckOnline calculate WPM and accuracy?

Accepted Answer

The test starts the clock on your first keystroke. Each correct character is counted; each wrong character is recorded as an error. Raw WPM is (total characters typed / 5) / minutes. Net WPM subtracts errors: ((correct characters / 5) / minutes). Accuracy is correct characters divided by total characters typed, expressed as a percent. The five-character word convention is industry standard and lets the score compare across languages and prompt content.

Question 3

What's the difference between raw WPM and net WPM?

Accepted Answer

Raw WPM counts every keystroke including mistakes; net WPM penalises errors. A typist who races through a prompt at 100 raw WPM but with 90% accuracy is actually slower than one typing at 75 raw WPM at 99% accuracy, because every uncorrected error compounds and every correction (backspace, retype) burns time. Most serious typing benchmarks report net WPM as the headline number. DeviceCheckOnline shows both so you can see whether to push speed or focus on precision.

Question 4

Why is my WPM lower here than on other typing tests?

Accepted Answer

Three reasons. First, prompt content matters: common-words tests inflate scores versus quote tests with punctuation, capitalisation and rare letter pairs. Second, scoring differs — some sites count errors only on submission, others penalise each wrong keystroke. Third, hardware and posture vary by session: a laptop chiclet keyboard with shallow travel will usually give lower numbers than a mechanical board you have muscle memory on. To compare cleanly, run the same prompt length on consistent hardware.

Question 5

How do I improve my WPM?

Accepted Answer

Touch-type without looking at the keys — speed is bottlenecked by your eyes if you hunt and peck. Use all ten fingers from the home row (ASDF / JKL;). Drill weak bigrams (letter pairs you slow on) rather than blasting through full prompts. Aim for 97% accuracy first; speed follows once movement is committed to muscle memory. Hardware matters less than technique, but a low-latency keyboard with consistent actuation helps — verify yours at /keyboard/latency.

Question 6

Does keyboard hardware affect my WPM score?

Accepted Answer

Marginally, but real. Switch type changes feedback: tactile and clicky switches give a clear actuation point that some typists ride faster than linear switches. Key travel matters — laptop keyboards with 1 mm travel can be quicker for short bursts but more fatiguing over long sessions. Most importantly, a keyboard that chatters or drops inputs under load will sandbag your accuracy. Check /keyboard/chatter for double-registers and /keyboard/rollover to confirm fast roll-typing isn't blocking keys.

Typing speed.