Typing test

How the score works

A word is five characters, spaces included, which is the convention every typing test has used since the typewriter days. Words per minute counts the characters you typed correctly, divided by five, divided by the minutes on the clock. Raw speed counts everything you typed, right or wrong. Accuracy is the share of your keystrokes that were right the first time; fixing a mistake with backspace still counts the mistake.

The clock starts on your first keystroke, not when the page loads. Mistakes are marked with an ink blot and stay marked until you backspace over them. In the timed modes a new passage is appended when you get near the end, so you never run out of text.

Racing a friend

Race a friend makes a room with a six-character code and a link. Up to eight people can be in a room. Whoever made it presses Start, everybody gets a three second countdown, and everybody types the same passage. The bars show how far along each person is, and the finish order and speeds are shown at the end. A room lives in memory on a small relay for as long as somebody is in it and is forgotten the moment it is empty. The relay never sees what you type, only your name for the room and how far you have got, and it keeps nothing.

The passages

Every passage is from a book or essay published before 1929 and long out of copyright: Austen, Dickens, Twain, Melville, Wilde, Conan Doyle, Thoreau, Whitman, Darwin, Franklin, Douglass, the Federalist papers, Mary Shelley, the Brontes, Verne in an old translation, Carroll, Baum, Wells, London and Chesterton. Each one is 40 to 80 words with ordinary punctuation, so nothing on it needs a key you do not have. The source is shown after each run.

What stays here

The test itself is plain JavaScript in your browser. Your runs and your best scores are kept in this browser's storage and nowhere else, and Forget my runs removes them. This page records that a run was finished and its speed, and that a race was joined, never the text or the names.