Word Per Minute in Speed Typing

What Does WPM (Word Per Minute) Mean

• In USA, a word is considered 5 characters.
• In Europe, sometimes a word is considered 6 characters.

For example, in USA, 100 WPM is 500 character-per-minute (CPM).

What Does Typing Speed Score Mean?

there are a few things important in the scores:

Duration of Test is Critical

15 seconds vs 5 minute tests are very different, by as much as 30 WPM. Most videos claiming high speed are 15 seconds. Some even 5 seconds.

Similar to, speed of 100 meter runners is about twice as fast than the speed of marathon runners.

Difference between 1 minute score vs 10 minute score , is about 25 to 30 WPM. (Source: Jashe Poon)

What Type of Text Typed is Critical

What type of text used is very significant, by as much as 50 WPM.

random easy words (e.g. monkeytype dot com) , no capital letters, no punctuation, no numbers, makes it easy to claim high WPM.

On the other extreme, typing Shakespeare or scientific formulas is the most difficult.

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. Example: 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 “Normalized Speed Typing Score”.

Professional Typist Speed

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

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.