Quote typing test

How the quote test works

This page gives you a medium-length passage, three lines at a time; the library also has short, long and the longest band, which it calls thicc. The timer starts when you press the first key and stops when you type the last character, so you are measured over the whole passage and nothing else.

A pause of more than 5 seconds marks the run as paused. You still see every number, but a paused run is kept off the leaderboards, since a long break in the middle would make the speed meaningless for comparison.

Scoring is identical to the word tests. Net WPM counts the characters in words you typed completely correctly, including the space after each one, divides by five and then by the minutes taken. A word with a missing comma or a lower-case letter where the book has a capital is a wrong word, and it adds nothing to your net figure. Raw WPM counts everything you typed. Accuracy is correct keypresses divided by all keypresses, so a mistake you went back and fixed still counts once. The scoring methodology page has each formula with a worked example.

The author and the book are named under the passage while you type. When you finish, the results screen shows a per-second speed chart, your burst speed on each word and the keys you missed most. Press Tab for a new passage with the same settings.

What's in the library

Every passage comes from a book in the public domain, taken from Project Gutenberg or, for Russian, from Russian Wikisource. Here is how the 437 quotes split by language and length:

The Portuguese passages keep the spelling of the early editions they come from, so you type words like "elle" and "annos" exactly as printed. The Russian quotes need a Russian keyboard layout set in your operating system; the test reads whatever your system sends and doesn't emulate Cyrillic layouts. The book list with Gutenberg numbers and licences is on the credits page.

Two preparation rules change how the passages feel to type. Any passage containing brackets, digits, footnote markers or all-capital headings was thrown out, so a quote never sends you to the number row. And curly quotes, guillemets, dashes and ellipses were normalised during cleaning, so you won't be hunting for typographic characters your keyboard doesn't have.

How long each quote takes

Speed in WPM converts directly to characters: at 60 WPM you type 300 characters a minute, because one standard word is five characters. That makes it easy to work out how long a passage will take.

No passage runs longer than 1,000 characters, so even the thicc band stays under five minutes at 40 WPM.

Why short quotes give jumpy numbers

A short quote is over in a few seconds, and every word in it carries a lot of weight. Here's the arithmetic. Say you type a 90-character quote at a steady 60 WPM: that takes 18 seconds. If you get one six-letter word wrong, you lose those six letters plus the space, 7 characters out of 90, and your net speed drops to 55.3 WPM. Make the same single mistake in a 600-character long quote typed at the same pace and you drop only to 59.3 WPM.

So a short quote is good for a warm-up or a quick burst, and a poor way to track progress. If you want a number you can compare week to week, use the long band, take three runs and keep the middle one.

Why your quote score is lower than your word-test score

Most people score lower on quotes than on the 1-minute typing test, and the gap is a fair measure of how much real writing costs you. Three things cause it.

Capitals come first. Every sentence start, name and "I" needs Shift, which is an extra keypress and an extra coordination step. Then come the punctuation keys at the edge of the keyboard: comma, period, apostrophe and quotation marks all sit under the right hand's middle, ring and little fingers on a US layout. Finally, book prose uses longer and rarer words than a common-word list. Our English 1,000-word list averages 5.08 letters per word and is built from film subtitles, so it's full of short, spoken words. Melville is not.

You can measure your own gap. Take a medium quote and a word test of similar length on the same day. If you score 72 WPM on words and 61 on the quote, your gap is 11 WPM, or about 15% of your word speed. Track that gap rather than either raw number, and when it shrinks you'll know your capitals and punctuation are catching up with your letters. The punctuation typing test isolates that part if you want to drill it on its own.

How to type quotes faster

Read one or two words ahead of your fingers. On random words, reading ahead barely helps, because there's no context; on prose, your brain predicts the next word from the sentence, and that prediction is free speed. Practise holding the next word in mind while your fingers finish the current one.

Use the Shift key on the opposite hand from the letter you're capitalising: left Shift for capitals typed with the right hand, right Shift for the left. Using one Shift key for everything forces an awkward same-hand stretch on half the alphabet.

Type a word and its punctuation as one unit. "said," is one movement that ends on the comma, not a word followed by a separate decision. The same goes for the closing quotation mark after a period.

Fix mistakes when you notice them. In net WPM a wrong word scores nothing, so spending a backspace or two to repair it usually returns more than it costs, especially in long words. Accuracy will still record the slip.

After a few runs, check the most-missed keys on the results screen. If the same letter keys keep appearing, practice builds a drill around the keys you actually miss.

Comparing your result fairly

Every quote has its own entry in the quote library, with its records and the average speed of every validated run on it. That average is the fairest yardstick you have: a Dickens sentence full of semicolons is harder than a line of dialogue from Tom Sawyer, and comparing your time with other people's on the same passage cancels that out.

The daily challenge gives everyone the same quote for each UTC day, with unlimited attempts and your best counting. A run needs 90% accuracy or better to be ranked.

What is a good quote typing speed?

The largest public study of typing speed, run by Aalto University and the University of Cambridge in 2018, measured 168,000 volunteers and found an average of 52 WPM, with most people between 30 and 60. Our net WPM is stricter than most sites' headline figure, because a word with a single slip counts for nothing, so read your quote score against that range with that in mind. If you're above 60 net on long quotes, you type real text faster than most people do.