Words, characters, keystrokes: how typing speed is measured

Most people know their typing speed in words per minute. The strange part is that a word in a typing test is not a word. By convention it is five characters, spaces and punctuation included, so the phrase "I run" counts as one word and "rhinoceros" counts as two. The reason is practical: real words vary too much in length to compare two typists who were given different texts.

Gross and net

To get gross WPM you divide the characters typed by five, then divide that by the minutes taken. Net WPM subtracts a penalty for mistakes that were left uncorrected. Which one a site shows decides whether you look fast or slow, and neither is wrong. They answer different questions, one about how quickly your fingers move and one about how much usable text you produced.

What is typical

A large study from Aalto University and the University of Cambridge collected the keystrokes of 168,000 volunteers, 136 million keystrokes in all, and published it in 2018. The average speed was 52 words per minute. Most people typed between 30 and 60, and a few went above 120. Other analyses of different groups put the average nearer 41.

The study also looked at what fast typists do. They make fewer mistakes. They use rollover, meaning they press the next key before they have released the last, for 40 to 70 percent of their keystrokes, and that held whether or not they touch type. And pairs of letters typed by different hands or fingers predicted speed better than repeated letters did.

Why this game counts keystrokes

HelloSubway shows characters per minute, counted in keystrokes. For English, divide by five to get WPM: 300 CPM is 60 WPM, and 600 CPM is 120. The gauge in the stats panel shows the last five seconds, so it falls when you stop. The figure on the result card is the average over the whole ride.

We changed the way this works after a player told us the numbers looked far too low compared with other sites. There were two causes. The clock started when the screen opened and not at the first key, so the time spent getting ready counted against you. And Korean was counted in syllables, while Korean typing sites count the individual letters, so the same typing looked two or three times slower here. Now the clock starts at your first keystroke, and 동두천, which is three syllables, counts as eight keystrokes.

The train classes

Every 150 CPM you move up a class: local, express, rapid, limited express, and bullet train at 600 and above. The idea is borrowed from Japanese railways, which label trains by how many stations they skip. A local train stops everywhere, and a limited express hardly stops. The scale is just a way of giving the same number a shape you can picture.

Try it

Enter a speed in characters or words per minute below to see which train class it earns, and how long any line in the game would take you at that pace.

A fair way to compare

If you want to compare yourself with someone else, use the same line in the same mode. The Express mode on the rankings page gives everyone sixty seconds and a random run of stations, which removes the differences in line length and station names. Within a single line, your best average is the number to track.