Typing Speed Test (WPM)

A timed typing test that runs for 15, 30, 60 or 120 seconds against a stream of common words, with each character highlighted as correct or wrong while you go. At the end you get words per minute, accuracy and a personal best kept in local storage. English, Korean and Japanese word lists are included.

The words-per-minute figure rests on a convention rather than a measurement: one "word" is five characters, spaces included, a standard fixed in the typewriter era so that typists of English could be compared at all. This test counts only the characters you got right, so the number it reports is already net of errors — typing fast and sloppily lowers it twice over, once through the uncounted characters and again through the seconds spent producing them. That is why the accuracy figure and the speed figure should be read together; a 90-word-per-minute run at 85 percent accuracy is slower work than 75 at 99, once the corrections are made.

Scores are not comparable across the three languages, and the gap is structural rather than a matter of practice. The five-character convention was built for an alphabet where one keystroke makes one character. A Korean syllable block takes two or three keystrokes to compose on a standard keyboard, and Japanese here is typed through an IME, where each word means romaji input plus a conversion step that the character count never sees. Compare your Korean score against your own Korean scores, and leave it at that.

Two things the number cannot tell you. A test on a random stream of common words measures a different skill from writing code or prose — no punctuation to speak of, no capitals, no thinking between words, and no backspacing over a sentence you have changed your mind about. And a single run is noisy: the words you happen to draw, how warm your hands are and how long since you last ate all move the result by more than most people's month-to-month progress. If you want to track improvement, compare medians over several runs on the same duration rather than chasing a personal best.