What WPM Means, and Why Two Tests Disagree

One word in a typing test means exactly five characters including the space that follows it, so a result of 60 WPM describes 300 characters entered in one minute rather than 60 words out of a dictionary. Every disagreement between two typing tests sits on top of that single rule.

What does WPM mean in a typing test?

WPM stands for words per minute, and the word in question is a fixed quantity of five keystrokes. Letters, spaces, punctuation and digits each count as one character, so the figure on your screen is characters entered, divided by five, divided by the minutes on the clock. A research note kept by I. Scott MacKenzie at York University sets out the same conversion from the other end: entry speed in characters per second, multiplied by 60 seconds per minute and divided by 5 characters per word, as described in a note on calculating text entry speed.

The convention is much older than the personal computer. It comes from typing competitions in the early 1900s, where a five stroke word equivalent made results from different passages comparable, and the same note traces that history to a 1980 survey of typewriters and typing methods by Hisao Yamada.

One consequence catches people out. A passage stuffed with long technical terms lowers nobody’s speed, because a fourteen letter word simply counts as almost three words. What does cost you is punctuation, capital letters and digits, since every reach for Shift or for the number row takes time while still adding only one character to the total.

Why do gross WPM and net WPM disagree?

Gross WPM is the raw arithmetic with no deduction for mistakes: 1,500 characters entered in five minutes is 300 characters a minute, which is 60 gross WPM. Net WPM applies a correction for mistakes, and two different corrections are in circulation. The classroom method subtracts one word for every uncorrected error before dividing by the time. The character method, which our test uses, counts only the characters that match the source and divides those by five. The two answers differ, so a figure called net WPM is worth nothing without the method beside it.

The size of that deduction surprises people, because a single percentage point of accuracy is worth three characters in a one minute run at 300 characters.

Read that as a price list rather than a verdict. It explains why a page that reports gross speed and a page that reports net speed can describe the same hands with numbers nine words apart, and why a result quoted without an accuracy percentage beside it is only half a measurement. Our typing test reports the gross figure and the character method net figure side by side, the last column above, along with a count of the corrections you made along the way.

Which unit will you meet outside a typing test?

Three units describe the same activity, and which one you see depends on who is asking.

• WPM, words per minute, is used by typing tests and by English language job ads.
• CPM, characters per minute, is WPM multiplied by five. German material uses the same idea under the name Anschläge pro Minute.
• KPH, keystrokes per hour, is CPM multiplied by sixty, and data entry ads prefer it because the numbers look larger on the page.

The conversion matters the moment a requirement arrives in an unfamiliar unit. An advert asking for 10,000 KPH is asking for roughly 167 characters a minute, which is close to 33 WPM. An advert asking for 12,000 KPH wants 40 WPM. Both are ordinary office figures, so a requirement that sounds enormous often describes an everyday pace. The arithmetic in full is in CPM and keystrokes per hour, and the numeric keypad variant of the same requirement is in the ten key test.

What actually moves a WPM figure?

Corrections move it more than mistakes do. In the CHI 2018 study Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes, run at Aalto University with Cambridge across 168,000 volunteers, the average uncorrected error rate was 1.17 percent, which is a fraction of a word per minute. The stronger relationship was with repair work: speed correlated at r = -0.36 with the number of error corrections and at r = -0.4 with keystrokes per character, against only r = -0.21 with the errors left in place.

In plain terms, the backspace key is where the seconds go. Every repair costs the wrong character, the backspace and the retype, plus the pause that comes before all three, and none of that shows up as an error in the final text.

Three other things move the figure without your technique changing at all. Test length is the largest: a 15 second run rewards a burst on familiar words, while a 60 second run brings in your recovery after a mistake and the moment attention slips near the end. Text familiarity is the second, because reading ahead is part of typing and a passage you have typed before measures memory. Layout is the third, since the same hands on an unfamiliar keyboard lose words per minute to hunting for punctuation, which the keyboard test will confirm in under a minute.

Who needs a WPM figure, and who can leave it alone

A WPM figure earns its minute if a job advert states a speed you need to translate, if your work is paid or scheduled by volume, or if you are practicing deliberately and want a baseline that is comparable week to week.

A WPM figure does very little for you if the plan is to set it against someone else’s result from another site under different marking rules, or if most of your keyboard time goes on short messages where thinking, not typing, sets the pace. Writers and programmers usually sit in that second group, because the bottleneck is composition rather than transcription.

The place to start is one 60 second run on a passage you have never seen, written down with its accuracy percentage beside it. Repeat it a week later at the same length on comparable text. Two figures gathered that way say more than twenty runs gathered at random lengths. The distribution those figures sit in is set out in average typing speed, and the marking rules behind them in how typing speed is measured.

When a WPM figure is measuring something other than typing

• A repeated passage measures your memory of that passage. The second run through the same text is faster for reasons that have nothing to do with your hands.
• A 15 second result compared with a 60 second result compares two clocks, not two skills.
• A gross figure compared with a net figure compares two accounting methods.
• A figure taken in a second language, or on a borrowed keyboard, mostly measures how foreign the punctuation feels that day.
• A single session is a sample of one, and ordinary variation between runs is a few words per minute in either direction, before sleep, chair height and keyboard are considered.

None of this makes the number useless. It makes it a measurement of one motion on one passage on one day, which is exactly what it is good for and nothing more.

FAQ

Does 60 WPM mean I typed 60 words from the passage?

No. It means you entered 300 characters in a minute, and the passage may have held 48 long words or 70 short ones. The five character convention exists so that both cases produce the same figure.

Do capital letters and punctuation count toward WPM?

They count as one character each, exactly like letters. They also cost time, because Shift and the punctuation keys sit off the home row, so a passage dense with semicolons and capitals reliably reports a lower figure than plain prose from the same person.

Why is my WPM lower here than on another site?

The most likely reasons are the deduction method and the clock. A site reporting gross speed will always show more than one reporting net speed, and a 15 second mode will always show more than a 60 second mode. Compare like with like before concluding anything about your typing.

Should I work on speed or on accuracy first?

Accuracy, if your net figure sits well below your gross figure or your corrections counter runs high. The study above found repair work more closely tied to speed than the errors left in the text, so slowing down until the backspace key goes quiet usually raises the total on its own.

Is WPM the same as typing skill?

It is one component. WPM describes transcription, which is copying text that already exists, while most keyboard work involves composing text at the same time. A comfortable transcription figure makes composition easier, but it does not measure it.

The pleasant way to see all of this is to type something worth typing. William Wordsworth published Composed upon Westminster Bridge in 1807, a sonnet about a city standing still at dawn, and its 459 characters carry two colons and three semicolons across eleven lines, which makes it a quiet way to watch what punctuation does to your rhythm. The Preamble to the United States Constitution from 1787 is one long sentence of 327 characters with a capital on nearly every noun, so both little fingers share the Shift work from the first word to the last. The Magna Carta clause on the liberties of the cities, sealed in 1215, is shorter at 242 characters and older than the language you speak. All three are waiting in the typing test, each with its author, year and source on its own page.