The fastest typists in the world

Who holds the typing speed records, why the numbers are so hard to compare, and how court reporters write 360 words a minute.

See how fast you type

The average person types about 52 words per minute. The people in this article type three, four, even six times as fast, and one court reporter has written 370 words in a single minute. So who is the fastest typist in the world? It depends on what you count, and the honest answer is a short list rather than one name.

Here are the records that hold up, what each one actually measured, and why a 15-second sprint on a typing website and an hour on a 1920s typewriter can't sit in the same league table.

The records at a glance

Each record was set under its own rules, so read this as a list of different events, not a ranking. Sources are at the end of the page.

Why there's no single answer

Typing speed sounds like one number. In practice, five things change it so much that records set under different conditions can't be compared.

The machine

On a manual typewriter, every key press has to fling a metal type bar at the paper. An electric typewriter does that work for you, and a computer keyboard needs only a light tap. Tangora's 147 WPM, held for a full hour on a manual machine, has the smallest number in the table and may be the hardest record on it.

The length

Almost anyone can push hard for 15 seconds. Holding a pace for a minute is harder, and for an hour harder still. That's why a typist's 15-second best is usually well above their one-minute best: the teenager behind the 305 WPM sprint has posted 272 WPM over a full minute.

The text

Copying an unseen passage with capitals, commas and numbers is far slower than typing lowercase common words. Monkeytype, the site behind the best-known recent speed records, builds its default English test from the 200 most common words, with no punctuation. Text matters even at the top: in the final of the 2010 Ultimate Typing Championship, the winner typed 163 WPM on the first text and 124 WPM on a harder one that used most of the keyboard.

The scoring

Some records are net of errors. Guinness lists Tangora's hour with a penalty of ten words for every mistake. Others count everything typed and report accuracy on the side, and a 97% result on a short test still means a few wrong letters.

Who was watching

A record set in front of judges, on a text nobody saw in advance, is a different thing from a video posted after hundreds of attempts at home. Neither is fake. They answer different questions.

Guinness gave up on part of this problem decades ago. When it dropped Barbara Blackburn's entry from its 1986 edition, it said speeds on electric and computer-driven machines could not be compared with any accuracy.

The typewriter champions

Two records from the typewriter age still stand, and they are very different kinds of achievement.

Albert Tangora set the first in October 1923: 147 words a minute for an hour on a manual Underwood, with mistakes deducted. A manual machine punishes a timid touch and rewards an even, forceful rhythm, so this was sixty minutes of hard, accurate striking with no let-up. Guinness still lists it as the record for a manual typewriter.

Stella Pajunas set the second in 1946, in an official test in Chicago: 216 words in one minute on an IBM machine. Guinness lists her (she later became Mrs Garnand) as the fastest typist on an electronic typewriter. It's a famous number with thin paperwork behind it. Accounts disagree on whether it came from a contest or a demonstration, and the original reports are hard to find. Treat it as one blistering minute on a fast machine, not a pace anyone could hold.

Barbara Blackburn and the Dvorak keyboard

For several years the fastest typist in the Guinness book was Barbara Blackburn, an American who typed on the Dvorak layout instead of QWERTY. She was credited with keeping up 150 WPM for 50 minutes and reaching 170 WPM, and she reported bursts of 212 WPM on a computer keyboard. The 212 is the figure you'll see quoted most often, and it's the least verified.

Her story has an awkward chapter. On Late Night with David Letterman in January 1985, she was set against one of the show's production assistants, the demonstration went badly, and Letterman jokingly crowned the assistant the fastest typist in the world. Blackburn said the typewriter had been sabotaged. By the 1986 edition, her records were out of the book.

Dvorak fans still point to her as proof that the layout is faster. One exceptional typist proves very little about a layout, in the same way one marathon winner doesn't prove their shoes. If you're curious about the layout itself, see QWERTY vs Dvorak vs Colemak.

Contests and leaderboards today

Modern speed typing happens on computer keyboards, mostly online, with the occasional live final.

The Ultimate Typing Championship, run by the keyboard maker Das Keyboard, held its first final at the South by Southwest festival in Austin in 2010. Sean Wrona won it, and the organisers billed his 163 WPM on the first text as an unofficial record. Wrona also held the record on TypeRacer, a racing site that uses quotes with capitals and punctuation: his 256 WPM race stood as the site's best for more than three and a half years, according to TypeRacer's own history of its records.

When the championship came back in 2020, a 17-year-old named Anthony Ermolin, who races as Chak, beat Wrona in the final and topped 200 WPM along the way.

The biggest numbers of all come from short tests on Monkeytype. In April 2023 a teenager known online as MythicalRocket posted 293 WPM over 15 seconds at 97% accuracy, and in 2024 he reached 304.76 WPM, reported everywhere as 305. He has also posted 272 WPM over a full minute. These are unsupervised results on the easiest text there is, typed at home and recorded on video, and they are astonishing all the same. He has said he practised for 15 to 30 minutes a day, which is the least glamorous and most useful detail in this whole article.

Typing on a phone

Phones have their own records, mostly for short sequences everyone knows by heart. Guinness lists Aaryan Pathak of India as the fastest to type the alphabet on a touchscreen phone: 2.88 seconds, set in New Delhi in May 2024. Twenty-six letters in under three seconds works out at about 108 WPM, which is remarkable thumb work on a memorised sequence.

Everyday phone typing is much slower. A large study of volunteers typing on their own phones found an average of about 36 WPM. If yours is lower, how to type faster on your phone has practical fixes.

How court reporters type 225 words a minute and more

The fastest writers in the world don't use an ordinary keyboard at all. Court reporters, and many of the captioners who write live subtitles, use a stenotype: a machine with 22 keys that are pressed several at a time, like chords on a piano.

One stroke writes a whole syllable, a word, or a common phrase. Keys on the left make the consonants at the start of a syllable, the thumbs press the vowels, and keys on the right make the consonants at the end. The keys are arranged by sound rather than spelling, so "court" starts with a K. What the machine records looks like nonsense until software translates it, using a dictionary of strokes that each reporter adds to over the years.

That's how the speeds get so high. A typist presses one key per letter; a stenographer presses one chord per syllable or word. To earn the National Court Reporters Association's Registered Professional Reporter certificate, a reporter must pass three five-minute tests: 180 WPM of literary text, 200 WPM of a judge's instructions to a jury, and 225 WPM of questions and answers, with at least 95% accuracy on each.

The record belongs to Mark Kislingbury of Houston. Guinness lists him at 360 WPM with 97.23% accuracy, set at the association's convention in July 2004. In 2022 he went further, writing 370 words in a minute at 95.4% accuracy, as reported by the association's Journal of Court Reporting.

Steno isn't a typing record in the usual sense, any more than a cyclist holds a running record. If you'd like to try it, Plover, a free program from the Open Steno Project, lets you write steno on some ordinary keyboards.

Where you fit

Records are fun, but the useful comparison is with ordinary typists. A 2018 study recorded 136 million keystrokes from 168,960 volunteers typing in their browsers. The average was 52 WPM, and the fastest people in the study typed around 120 WPM. More on that study is in average typing speed.

Using a bell curve fitted to the study (the same one the results page on this site uses), here is how rare each speed is:

Beyond about 120 WPM the curve stops being trustworthy, because the study had so few typists out there. What's safe to say is that every speed in the records table is far rarer than one in a few thousand.

What the fastest typists do differently

The same study looked at what separates quick typists from average ones, and finger speed was only part of it.

• They overlap their key presses. The fastest tenth pressed about half of their keys before letting go of the previous one, against about 8% for the slowest tenth, so two fingers work at once. This is called rollover.
• They make fewer mistakes, so they spend less time fixing them. About 3.4% of their key presses were Backspace, against about 6% for the average typist.
• They keep an even rhythm, with few pauses in the middle of words.

Most of that can be trained. It takes practice of the right kind: short, regular, and aimed at whatever slows you down. The level-by-level plan in how to type 100 WPM shows what to work on at each stage, and how to type faster covers the basics.

Where to start

Take a one-minute typing test and look past the headline number. The results page shows how your speed compares with the 2018 study, how much time went on fixing mistakes, your slowest letter pairs and how often you roll over keys. Pick the one thing costing you most, practise it for ten minutes a day, and test again next week.

If you'd rather chase a person than a number, start a typing race with friends. Your profile also earns a speed badge every 10 WPM from 30 to 200. Very few people in the world can hold 200 WPM for a minute, so there's plenty of room above you, whatever your speed today.

Sources

• Guinness World Records, “Fastest typist on a manual typewriter in an hour test” (Albert Tangora, 1923) and “Fastest typist on an electronic typewriter” (Stella Pajunas, 1946).
• Guinness World Records, “Fastest realtime court reporter (stenotype writing)” (Mark Kislingbury, 2004) and “Fastest time to type the alphabet on a touchscreen mobile phone” (Aaryan Pathak, 2024).
• Journal of Court Reporting, National Court Reporters Association, “Mark Kislingbury breaks own record”, 2022.
• National Court Reporters Association, “Registered Professional Reporter (RPR)” skills test requirements.
• Das Keyboard, history and results of the Ultimate Typing Championship (2010) and its announcement of the 2020 winners.
• TypeRacer, “A history of TypeRacer speed records”, 2017.
• Tom's Hardware, “Unofficial 293 WPM typing world record set by MythicalRocket”, 2023; SteelSeries, “Typing world record on a SteelSeries keyboard”, 2023; Fox News and CyberGuy, “Teenage typing phenom hits insane 305 words per minute”, 2024.
• Monkeytype, About page (default test of the 200 most common English words).
• Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson and Oulasvirta, “Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes”, CHI 2018, and Aalto University's news release on the study.
• Palin, Feit, Kim, Kristensson and Oulasvirta, “How do People Type on Mobile Devices? Observations from a Study with 37,000 Volunteers”, MobileHCI 2019.
• Wikipedia, “Barbara Blackburn (typist)”, for her Guinness listings and the 1985 television appearance.