How many words do you think you’ve written/typed in your lifetime? Let’s do a quick math exercise. Hey, where are you going?? Just because I used the words “math” and “exercise” doesn’t mean it’ll be boring. Stick around! There’s a sweet prize* at the end if you do!
Alright, so let’s say you type 50 words per minute (and don’t worry, we’ll come back to this — it’s the subject of today’s test). Let’s also say you have a Monday-Friday office job that requires you to spend 50% of your time typing; assume your weekends are spent blissfully free of typing of any kind.
Side note: If you’re like me, the rest of that work time is spent in meetings that could’ve been emails (~35%) and trying to find online games to play that don’t look conspicuously like games (~15%).
Let’s also assume that you’re 38 years old and you’ve been typing at roughly this pace since you went to college at 18, i.e. for 20 years. A lot of assumptions, sure, but this is just to get a baseline. So the math is really just “How many words per minute can I type and how many minutes have I been typing?” Or:
Words Typed = WPM * (60*(8*50%)*(365/7*5)*20)
60 minutes per hour, 50% of an 8-hour workday, roughly 260 workdays in a year, all over the course of 20 years. That comes to 1.248 million minutes; at 50 WPM, that comes to 62.4 million words.
Some quick Googling tells me that English has ~250,000 words. If we assume one dictionary has that amount of words, you could fill just under 250 dictionaries. A few more comps:
That’s almost one word for every person in France.
The entire Harry Potter book series has 1,084,625 words, meaning you could write 57 full series of equivalent length and be halfway through the 58th. (Maybe make sure at least one of those series isn’t transphobic.)
Kurt Vonnegut’s amazing short story Harrison Bergeron has, by my count, 2,184 words. That means you’d have typed the equivalent of 28,571 Harrison Bergerons. Your move, Vonnegut!
None of this even factors in handwriting, whiteboard scribbles, text messages, Tweets, DMs, Instagram comments, or anything else made via mobile. Or, to borrow from Bo Burnham:
That’s a LOT of words — and for people who have been alive longer, or whose jobs include more writing or whatever else, that number can be exponentially higher. The clip above notwithstanding, that’s not even necessarily a bad thing. It’s just staggering! Imagine writing a short story like Harrison Bergeron. Now imagine writing one per day for the next 78 years. That’s how long it’d take to get to that 28,571 figure above.
Well … assuming you type 50 Words Per Minute, anyway. But I don’t think I do. I think I’m faster.
I grew up with AOL Instant Messenger (or AIM), and for those in my age bracket, just let the nostalgia wave take hold. Remember profiles? Away messages? Remember SmarterChild?! Ahh, those were the days. I often tell people that I learned to type on AIM, and that’s honestly pretty accurate. I wasn’t much of a Mavis Beacon person, and I only remember typing classes once or twice in school.
I DEFINITELY never learned how to type the proper way, with the home row keys and everything. I think my style can best be described as “Frenetic Hunt-and-Peck” or “Chaotic Semi-Precision” or something. The nice thing is: it works for me! They’d never teach this in a formal setting, since it looks and feels insane to even analyze right now, but it gets results.
What kind of results? Glad you asked!
Words Per Minute seems like one of those things that’s not too important, IMO. Accuracy rate seems more important, since it minimizes how many times you have to delete and go back and type again and maybe delete again and start yet again. That said, it’s never been easier to get your mistakes fixed automatically. From classic tools like spell check to Grammarly and AutoCorrect to more modern AI-based tools, you can speed through whole paragraphs at a time and let machines clean up after you. It’s sort of like having the robot butler we all want, but … for words. It’s not exactly the dream, but it’s not nothing!
So today, I want to see how fast I type. Will this teach me much about myself? No, not really. Sort of goes against the entire premise here, I get that. But it’s Friday, and I’ve got a bad case of … whatever the work week version of Senioritis is. Fridayitis? Weekendometriosis? Tiredofworkingandeagertogoplayvideogamesbutcantyet Fever? I’ve got that, and I’ve got it BAD.
So instead, let’s go to TypingTest.com!
If you visited the link, you may notice that there are a lot of tests available, including a “Certificate” option. I think this might be the first test I’ve taken thus far that includes a real “reward” for completing it. I promise I’ll hang it on the wall right between my marriage license and my QuickBooks certification.
Before I get certified, I want to warm up a little bit. I figure two minutes of medium text ought to do it — AND it’ll give me some sort of a baseline score while I’m at it. Let’s get typing! Back in two minutes.
Okay! I just did some dummy text typing for two minutes and my results are in. How’d I do?
83 WPM net speed, baby — and only one typo!! To be honest, there were more typos, I just went back and corrected them. I wonder how much it would have impacted my results if I’d just let them be and kept plugging away. Instead, I (mostly) sacrificed speed for accuracy and this was the result. Not bad, I imagine. Certainly higher than the made up number from the start of this post. But now it’s time to get serious:
The gauntlet has been thrown down. Five minutes of high stakes, immensely important, life-altering typing are all that stand between me and a certificate stating how fast I type. In my life, I’ve been to roughly a dozen weddings and half as many funerals. I’ve graduated college, closed on a house, been hired, promoted, and fired. I’ve worked through a deep, dark depression and substance abuse issue and come out on the other side. And I’m not exaggerating when I say this is the most important day of my life by a wide margin.
Alright, I’m exaggerating a little. But I still want to do well. Wish me luck! If you’re bored and want to spend the five minutes with me for whatever reason, might I recommend this video of a small jam session between friends?
Without further ado, here we are:
I’ll be honest, this result makes a lot of sense. For one, I accidentally hit enter at the end of the test, which moved me on to the next section before I meant to. All five of those typos were from me trying to finish the prior paragraph. Even so, this is somewhat slower than the first test suggested. Why is that, you ask?
Honestly, my arms got tired near the end. Typing is one of those things that you never think of as being tiring, but you also don’t normally spend five straight minutes doing it without any sort of break. Even these posts are very much stop-and-start affairs for me, where most of the stops are spent looking at something else on the Internet (or, uh, doing my actual job). Anecdotally, I felt like I started strong and got slower as time went along. That includes making more little mistakes that I went back to correct.
So there we have it: over longer periods of time, I’m at roughly 78 WPM. In short bursts, that can be as fast as 83. One last thing I wanted to do before calling this test quits was to see what the benchmarking was all about. After all, context is helpful. If I type 78 WPM and the average is 50, I’m telling August Dvorak to suck it because I am his God now. If I type 78 WPM and the average is 189, I’m abandoning my suburban life and reverting back to cave tools. So yeah, context is helpful.
The benchmarking test was two minutes long and I did the worst on it of the three tests so far. Still, check this out:
Even at my slowest, I’m somewhere between 124% and 147% faster than average. Or, in helpful visualization form:
That seems like it can’t be right, can it? A quick Google search tells me the average WPM is closer to 41, so I’d still be significantly faster, but none of that is substantiated anywhere. Or, if it is, I’m too tired to go looking for it. Instead, I’ll bask in the knowledge that all those years of AIM finally paid off. I owe you one, SmarterChild!
*I totally didn’t forget about the prize. To anyone who made it this far, here you go.