Typing Tutorial, Speed Test, Typing Games

Here is a collection of the best websites for typing tutorial, typing test, and typing games.

Typing Tutorials

Here is a list of the best typing tutorials.

https://www.typing.com/student/start (QWERTY only)

https://www.typingclub.com/

http://thetypingcat.com/ (supports many layouts: QWERTY, Dvorak, Colemak, and others.)

Typing Speed Test Sites

• https://play.typeracer.com/
• https://thetypingcat.com/typing-speed-test
• https://www.typing.com/student/test

Typing Games

• 
  Typing of the Dead

2021-04-29

What Does Typing Speed Score Mean?

This test is harder than the normal type racer sites etc. Because those sites use very simple words, and do no even form meaningful sentences. This test site, actually makes you type a written essay. Also, the 5 min test is notable. Because most chat about speed test is 1 min. 1 min speed is significantly different from speed for 5 min. Similar to, best 100 meter runner is not best at 1 km competition. 5 minute is more realistic if you do a lot writing.

Most other sites just use combo of top 500 most frequent words in English, random combo that doesn't even make meaningful sentences, and don't even include punctuation, no comma, no period, no quote, nothing. But when typing a essay (not online chat), there's punctuation, capitalization, and hard words like occationally a place name such as San Francisco or California, etc.

Standardized Type Speed Score?

This made me think. A way to solve the scoring problem across sites.

Typically, speed is measured by Words Per Minute (WPM). And a word is taken to be 5 characters. And the popular speed test sites that people post are usually 1 min tests. Which, is a sprint but does not represent real life at all. Also, depending on the text, diff sites can give diff wpm score that differ by as much as 20 wpm.

So, one of the big variable is how easy is the text. E.g. Does it have capitalization, punctuation, grammatical and meaningful or just random words, or it can be actually random sequence of characters (which will be MOST difficult).

So, we can come up with a measure by score of the difficulty level, say, 1 to 10 (with 10 being most difficult, of random sequence of up/lower case chars on normal computer keyboard). So, if someone types say 70wpm with difficulty level of 5 and 5 min test, we can normalize it by a formula and derive a “standard type speed score”.

About Typing Speed Test

Professional typists type 70 word-per-minute (wpm) and can maintain that speed for at least 30 minutes.

In word-per-minute count, 5 key strokes is counted as 1 word. So, 100 WPM is 500 keys-per-minute. (often known as Chars-per-minute (CPM).)

Typing speed score depends a lot on the words used. Daily speech words such as “how are you today” are easy to type. Words from newspapers, magazines, books, are more difficult.

Different typing tests might have scores differ by more than 10wpm. If you are comparing scores with a friend, you two must use the same site.

Keyboard and Typing Speed

What kind of keyboard you use have significant effect on your typing speed.

In general, flat, shallow key keyboard such as laptop keyboard are faster than fancy ergonomic keyboards such as Kinesis Advantage2 Keyboard. Also, linear switches are significantly faster than tactile switches. for example, my speed on Kinesis Advantage2 Keyboard with linear switch (Cherry MX Silent Red) is 10 WPM faster than on tactile Cherry MX Brown. [see Keyboard Key Switch Mechanisms]

Fastest Typist

The fastest typing speed on an alphanumeric keyboard, 216 words in one minute, was achieved by Stella Pajunas in 1946 on an IBM electric. As of 2005, writer Barbara Blackburn was the fastest alphanumerical English language typist in the world, according to The Guinness Book of World Records. Using the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, she maintained 150 wpm for 50 minutes, and 170 wpm for shorter periods. Her top speed was 212 wpm. Current online records of sprint speeds on short text selections are 290 wpm, achieved by Guilherme Sandrini, on typingzone.com, and 256 wpm (a record caught on video), achieved by Sean Wrona, on TypeRacer. Wrona also maintained 174 wpm on a 50 minute test taken on hi-games.net.

[from Wikipedia Words per minute]