Typing Test

Thirty seconds to type as many words as you can. Most typing tests are built for a desk and behave badly on a phone: autocorrect quietly fixes your mistakes, autocapitalise breaks the first letter of every line, and the text scrolls under the keyboard. This one turns all of that off and shows three lines at a time, so the number you get back is your actual typing rather than your phone's guess at it.

How to play

Tap the box at the bottom and start typing — the clock does not begin until your first keystroke, so there is no rush to get ready. Type each word and press space to move on. Space is what commits a word, so a word is judged exactly as it stood when you hit space.

While you are on a word, each letter turns white as you get it right and red as you get it wrong, and you can backspace to fix it. Once you press space the word is locked; there is no going back to an earlier word. Words you never reach do not count against you.

The score is words per minute, using the standard convention that a word is five characters. It counts the letters you typed in the right position, plus the space after any word you spelled exactly right. Accuracy is the share of everything you typed that landed correctly.

The words are English in every language, the same as the other word games here. They are common short words of four to seven letters, so what is being measured is your typing rather than your vocabulary.

Tips & strategy

Accuracy is worth more than speed, and the arithmetic says so plainly. A word you misspell costs you every character in it plus the space, and on a four-letter word that is five characters gone — roughly a whole word of score. Typing at ninety per cent accuracy and slowing down to ninety-eight almost always raises the final number even though it feels slower.

Do not look at the counter while you type. The words-per-minute figure updates live and it is the single most distracting thing on the screen; every glance costs you a word. Look only at the word you are on, and let the score be a surprise at the end.

On a phone, thumbs beat one finger for almost everyone, but only if you commit to alternating them. The common mistake is using the right thumb for everything and the left one only for letters on the far left, which forces your right thumb to cross the keyboard. Split the keyboard down the middle and let each thumb own its half.

Type the whole word before you check it. Reading each letter as it appears halves your speed because you stop between keystrokes. Common four and five letter words are already in your fingers as single motions; trust them and glance at the result only when the word is done.

If you keep hitting the same wrong letter, it is almost always a neighbouring key rather than a mental slip. Slow down on that one letter specifically for a few runs. Fixing one bad key is usually worth more than trying to get generally faster.