100 word typing test

What a hundred words measures

A hundred words is long enough that the result reflects your normal rhythm, not a lucky start. A single word left wrong takes only about 1% of the characters out of your net total, around 0.6 WPM at 60 WPM. Compare that with roughly 10% per wrong word on the 10-word test. One hesitation barely registers either: half a second on a two-minute run moves the result by well under 1 WPM.

It also starts to show pacing. Over two minutes an opening burst has time to fade toward working speed, and the per-second chart and consistency score show whether you held a steady line or faded.

How long 100 words takes

Counted as standard words, a hundred words is 500 characters. Our English list averages 5.08 letters a word, so with spaces the actual text is about 600 keystrokes, a little more than the standard count.

Timing in words mode

The clock starts with your first keypress. Anything before it is start latency, recorded separately and not counted. The clock stops when you complete the hundredth word, so you're never cut off mid-word, and there's no partial word at the end.

A gap of more than five seconds while typing marks the result as paused. You'll still see all of it, but it won't be ranked. On a test this long, that's the rule most likely to catch you out: if you need to stop, finish the run and take another rather than resuming after a break.

Using 100 words as your benchmark

Pick a fixed slot, say the same morning each week, and run the test three times. Write down the median net WPM and accuracy. After a month you'll have a trend line that isn't distorted by one good or bad day. In between, spend your practice time on the most-missed keys the results screen shows, using practice mode, and try the quotes test now and then for real sentences with punctuation.

If you'd rather fix the clock than the word count, the 2-minute test uses the same word list and the same scoring.

Scoring and a sense of scale

Net WPM is the characters in every word typed exactly right, plus its trailing space, divided by five and by the minutes between your first and last keystroke. Raw WPM counts all typed characters. Accuracy is correct character keypresses over all character keypresses; backspace isn't counted and a fixed error still counts once. The metrics page has the exact formulas.

For scale, the 2018 Aalto University and University of Cambridge study of about 168,000 volunteers found a mean of 52 WPM, with most people typing 30 to 60. A 100-word result reads closer to sustained speed than the shorter word tests do, so 50 to 60 net here is solid typing.