50 word typing test
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The 50 word typing test is about a minute of typing for most people: fifty common English words, timed from your first keystroke to the one that completes the last word. It's long enough that one fumbled word doesn't decide the result and short enough to repeat. You get net WPM, raw WPM, accuracy and the burst speed of all fifty words, which makes this the best words-mode length for finding what slows you down.
Fifty words as a one-minute benchmark
On our English list a word averages 5.08 letters, so fifty words with their spaces come to about 300 keystrokes. Fifty standard five-character words would be 250 characters. Either way, at 60 WPM the test takes almost exactly a minute.
| Your speed | Time for 50 words from our list (approx.) |
|---|---|
| 40 WPM | 1 min 31 s |
| 52 WPM | 1 min 10 s |
| 60 WPM | 1 min 1 s |
| 80 WPM | 46 s |
The difference from a 1-minute timed test is what's held fixed. There, the clock is fixed and the amount of text varies; here, the text is fixed and the time varies. Because every attempt has the same length, your results line up neatly in your history, which suits tracking progress week to week.
Sample size is also kinder than on shorter word tests. A single word left wrong takes about 2% of the characters out of the net total, so roughly 1.2 WPM at 60 WPM. On a 10-word test the same slip costs five times as much.
Using the per-word breakdown
After each run, the results screen lists every word with its burst speed: the WPM of that word alone. Fifty words is enough for patterns to show.
Look for words that are slow every time. Often they share a letter pair, for example one typed with the same finger twice in a row or one that jumps between rows. Take the two or three worst into practice mode for focused drills, then come back and run fifty words again.
Words that were wrong are excluded from net WPM, so check whether your slow words and your wrong words are the same ones. If they are, slow down on them on purpose; if they aren't, you're rushing the easy words.
Timing rules
The timer starts on your first keypress. Seconds spent before that are recorded as start latency and don't count. It stops on the keystroke that finishes the fiftieth word, so no word is ever cut in half. A pause of more than five seconds marks the result as paused: it's still shown, with every metric, but it isn't ranked.
Net WPM is the characters of correctly typed words, including the trailing space, divided by five and by the minutes between first and last keystroke. Raw WPM counts all typed characters, and accuracy is correct character keypresses over all of them, with backspace not counted. The metrics page has the formulas.
A good result over fifty words
The 2018 Aalto and Cambridge study, which analysed about 168,000 volunteers, found most people typed between 30 and 60 WPM and the mean was 52. A fifty-word test sits near the short end of test lengths, where scores tend to come in a little higher than on long timed tests, so 60 here is a good everyday result and 80 or more is fast.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a 50 word typing test take?
At 60 WPM, about a minute. Slower typists take closer to a minute and a half; at 80 WPM it's under 50 seconds.
What is burst speed?
It's the WPM of a single word, measured over just that word. Comparing bursts shows which words cost you time even when the overall score looks fine.
Can I take the 50 word test in another language?
Yes. Switch the language in settings; there are word lists for 49 languages, drawn from FrequencyWords (OpenSubtitles 2018 data, lists under CC BY-SA 4.0).
Is 50 words better than a timed test?
For comparing yourself over time it's often handier, since every run has identical length. For comparing with other people, timed tests are the more common convention.