How to type faster: changes that actually move your WPM

What fast typists do differently

In 2018, researchers at Aalto University and the University of Cambridge recorded 136 million keystrokes from 168,960 volunteers (Dhakal and colleagues). They compared the fastest tenth, above about 78 WPM, with the slowest tenth, under about 26 WPM. The differences are the to-do list for this post.

The first row is the whole game in one number. A five-keystroke word at 120 ms a key is 500 keystrokes a minute, which is 100 WPM. At 480 ms it's 125 keystrokes a minute, or 25 WPM. Every technique below is a way of shaving milliseconds off that gap.

The study also found something that should reassure anyone who never took a typing class. Volunteers who had taken a course were only about 5 WPM faster on average, and the authors found trained and untrained typists behaved very similarly. What you do with your fingers matters more than how you learned.

1. Fix accuracy before you chase speed

The quickest way to raise net WPM is usually to slow down. Each error costs a backspace, a retype and a pause to see what went wrong, which is several keystroke gaps for one character. The fastest typists in the 2018 study also made the fewest errors. Speed and accuracy weren't a trade-off for them; they came together.

In practice: type at the speed where your accuracy holds at 97% or better for a week, then push. If you're at 92% now, your fastest route to a higher net score is a slower raw one. The arithmetic of why 90% costs so much is in what typing accuracy really measures, and the drills for fixing it are in how to improve typing accuracy.

2. Press each key with the same finger, every time

A 2016 Aalto study (Feit, Weir and Oulasvirta) filmed 30 everyday typists with motion capture. Touch typists averaged 57.8 WPM and people who didn't touch type averaged 58.9, not a meaningful difference. What did predict speed was consistency: faster typists pressed each key with the same finger more reliably. Slower typists switched fingers on the same key from one press to the next.

That's good news if you type with six fingers and don't want to start over. Speed comes from each key having one owner. The standard ten-finger chart is the easiest way to give every key an owner, and the touch typing finger chart lays it out key by key.

The usual problem keys are the ones on a boundary between fingers: C, which is easy to reach with the index finger instead of the middle; B, which drifts between hands; and the far-right keys like P and the brackets, which the ring finger often steals from the little finger. Your results screen lists your most-missed keys after each test. If one key keeps showing up there, check which finger you're using on it. In our experience, retraining one key takes about a week of feeling clumsy and pays off afterwards.

3. Keep your eyes on the text and read one word ahead

The same 2016 study found that people who didn't touch type spent much more time looking at the keyboard. That didn't make them slower in the lab, but it means every glance down is a moment you're not reading what comes next, and finding your place again costs time on long or unfamiliar text.

Reading ahead is the other half. Timothy Salthouse's 1985 experiments on transcription typing restricted how many characters typists could see ahead of the one they were typing. Speed held up until the preview dropped below about four characters, and typists' eye-hand span, how far their reading ran ahead of their fingers, averaged about four characters. Faster typists had longer spans, about 1.2 characters more for every 20 net WPM.

Practically, that means your eyes should be on the next word while your fingers finish the current one. If you find yourself reading a word, typing it, then looking for the next, you're paying a pause on every space. Quote passages are better for practicing this than random word lists, because real sentences let you predict what's coming; try the quote typing test.

4. Learn rollover and use hand alternation

Rollover means pressing the next key before you've released the last one. In the 2018 data it was one of the strongest single predictors of speed (a correlation of 0.73 with WPM). The average volunteer did it on 25% of keypresses; most of the fastest typists did it on 40 to 70%, overlapping keys by about 30 ms on average and up to 100 ms.

The easiest place to start is where the two hands alternate. While your left hand presses T, your right can already be on its way to H. For fast typists, alternating-hand pairs were 5 to 20 ms quicker than pairs typed by one hand. For the slowest typists it was the reverse, which suggests they were still moving one finger at a time no matter which hand it was on.

The 2016 study saw the same thing from a different angle: moving toward the next key during the previous keystroke was linked to higher speed.

A simple drill: type words that alternate hands on every letter, such as "when", "with", "such", "them" and "they", and let the second hand start moving as the first hand presses. Don't force the overlap; it appears on its own once the motion is familiar. The words that matter most are the common short ones, because you type them thousands of times a day.

5. Drill your slow letter pairs instead of retaking tests

A test measures; it doesn't train. Taking ten one-minute tests in a row mostly rehearses the letter pairs you're already good at.

Your weak spots are specific. They're a handful of letter pairs and words where your timing drops, often on the same finger or the same hand. The results screen shows your most-missed keys and a per-word breakdown after each test, and the practice drill builds a 50-word session weighted toward the keys and words you miss, mixed with common words so it still reads like text. Ten to fifteen minutes a day of that does more than an hour of tests.

How to structure those sessions over two months, and what to expect each fortnight, is in the 40 to 80 WPM practice plan linked at the top. We won't repeat it here.

6. Keep your hands quiet

Fast typists in the motion-capture study kept their hands mostly still and moved their fingers, while slower typists moved their whole hands more. Each hand movement is a small relocation you then have to correct before the next key.

Rest your fingers on the home row between words, keep your wrists level rather than planted, and let the fingers reach. If your hands slide around the keyboard during a test, that's worth fixing before any speed drill.

What doesn't make much difference

A new keyboard. Switches and keycaps can make long sessions more comfortable, but the evidence for raw speed gains is thin; our keyboards post goes through it. Rollover does need a keyboard that registers overlapping keys; if yours drops letters when you type quickly, check that first.

Switching layout. Moving to Colemak or Dvorak usually sets you back to beginner speed for weeks, and the long-run gain for speed is small and disputed. It can be worth it for comfort.

A course on its own. In the 2018 data, people who had taken one were about 5 WPM faster on average. Useful, not transformative. What you practice afterwards decides the rest.

How fast will you improve?

Gains come quickly at first and slow down later, and the keystroke arithmetic shows why. Going from 40 to 50 WPM means cutting the average gap from 300 ms to 240 ms, mostly by hesitating less. Going from 80 to 90 means cutting 150 ms to 133 ms, and those 17 ms have to come from overlapping keys, which takes longer to train. A typist at 40 can often add 10 WPM in a month or two of daily practice; at 80, a few WPM a month is a good month.

If you type mostly on a phone, the rules are different: thumbs, autocorrect and prediction matter more than finger assignment. See how to type faster on your phone.

Frequently asked questions

How can I type faster without looking at the keyboard?

Give every key one finger, then practice with the keyboard out of sight for short sessions, even if it means slowing to 20 WPM at first. Accuracy recovers before speed does. The finger chart post has the full key map.

Can you type faster than 100 WPM?

Yes, though few people do: on our estimate from the 2018 study, 100 WPM is roughly the top 1% of keen online typists. Getting there takes high rollover and very consistent fingering more than raw finger speed.

Does typing with fewer fingers slow you down?

Not necessarily. In the 2016 study, people who didn't touch type averaged 6.2 fingers and typed as fast as touch typists. Consistency per key mattered more than finger count, though in the larger 2018 data more fingers did go with higher speed.

Should I practice speed or accuracy first?

Accuracy. Hold 97% for a week at a comfortable pace, then push speed while keeping accuracy above about 95%.