How to type 100 WPM

What holds you back at 40 WPM is not what holds you back at 80. Here is what to work on at each speed.

Find your speed band

100 WPM is a round number and a rare one. In a study of 168,960 typists, the average was 52 WPM and the fastest tenth started at about 78. On the normal curve this site uses for its comparisons, 100 WPM is faster than about 99 typists in 100. If that's your goal, you're aiming for the top end of a very large crowd.

The good news is that the climb from 40 to 100 isn't one long slog. It's a series of different problems, and each speed band has its own bottleneck. Typists who stay stuck for months are usually practising hard on the wrong one: drilling rhythm when their real problem is looking at the keys, or doing endless tests when what they need is fewer corrections. Find your band, fix its bottleneck, move on.

Is 100 WPM good?

It's very good. Here's where each speed sits, with how long a 1,000-word document takes at that speed if you typed it straight through:

Percentiles from a normal curve fitted to the 2018 study (mean 51.56 WPM, standard deviation 20.2). The real spread has a slightly longer fast tail than a normal curve, so the top rows are approximate. One word is five characters.

Notice what happens to the time saved. Going from 40 to 60 saves eight minutes on that document; going from 80 to 100 saves two and a half. Past 80, extra speed matters less for getting work done and more for the satisfaction of it, or for jobs such as transcription where every minute of typing is paid for. That's a fine reason. Just know that it's the reason. For more on what an ordinary speed looks like, see average typing speed.

What fast typists do differently

The 2018 study, which recorded 136 million keystrokes, compared the fastest tenth of its typists (about 90 WPM on average) with the slowest tenth (about 21 WPM). Some of the differences are what you'd expect. One is not.

They don't press keys faster. The time a key is held down was about 104 milliseconds for the fast group and 129 for the slow group, a small difference. The big difference is the gap between key presses: about 120 milliseconds for the fast group against more than 480 for the slow group. Speed lives in the transitions, in how quickly the next finger is ready.

They overlap keys. Fast typists often press the next key before letting go of the last one. The researchers called this rollover, and of all the habits they measured it was the one most strongly linked to speed. The fastest tenth used it on about half of their key presses, the slowest tenth on about 8%. When keys overlapped, they did so by about 30 milliseconds on average.

They make and fix fewer mistakes. Backspace and Delete were about 3.4% of the fast group's key presses and 9% of the slow group's, and the fast group also left fewer errors behind. Corrections are expensive, and fast typists simply need fewer of them.

Training wasn't the difference. People who had taken a typing course were only about 5 WPM faster on average than people who hadn't. How you practise now matters far more than a course you once took.

Earlier research points the same way. In 1984 the psychologist Timothy Salthouse linked typing skill to overlapping successive keystrokes and to how much of the upcoming text a typist needs to see to keep their normal pace. Fast typists read ahead, and their fingers start the next letters before the last ones are finished.

You can see where you stand on each of these. The results page on this site shows your own time between key presses, share of overlapping key presses and Backspace share, each placed between the study's slowest and fastest tenth.

Under 40 WPM: your eyes are the bottleneck

Below about 40 WPM, the most common problem is where you're looking. Every glance down at the keys and back to the screen costs a fraction of a second, breaks your place in the text and makes mistakes more likely. No drill fixes that except learning where the keys are by feel.

So this band's job is touch typing, with accuracy as the only score that counts. Aim for 96% or better and ignore your speed for now. Expect to get slower for a week or two before you get faster; that dip is the old habit dying. Ten to fifteen minutes a day of the touch typing lessons is enough, and how to type without looking has tricks for the moments when your eyes drift down anyway.

40 to 60 WPM: rhythm and reading ahead

Once you can find every key without looking, the bottleneck moves to the spaces between words. Typists in this band usually type a word, stop, look at the next word, then type that. On the results page this shows up as slow word starts and long pauses, each with an estimate of the speed it costs you.

Two habits fix it. First, keep your eyes one word ahead of your fingers, so the next word is ready by the time you press space. Second, slow down slightly and refuse to stop. A steady 50 beats a burst of 70 followed by a pause, because the pause costs more than the burst gains. The consistency score on your results is the number to watch here.

This is also the band where common words should become automatic. According to Oxford's analysis of its corpus of more than two billion words of English, the 100 most common words (counting forms like is, was and were as one word) make up about half of everything written. If "the", "and", "that" and "with" still feel like four separate key presses each, they're costing you on every line.

60 to 80 WPM: letter pairs and corrections

At this level your typing is smooth on easy words and lumpy on a handful of awkward ones. The lumps are usually particular letter pairs: two letters typed by the same finger, such as "ed" or "un", or reaches to the edges of the keyboard. Two or three of those can cost you more than everything else put together, and ordinary tests improve them only slowly because they don't come up often enough.

Drill them directly. After each test the results page lists your slowest pairs and keys and can build a short practice drill full of words that contain them. Five minutes of that does more than twenty minutes of general tests.

The second job in this band is cutting corrections. Look at how much of your time goes on fixing mistakes, which the results page shows in seconds. If it's more than a few seconds a minute, slow down by 5 to 10% for a week. It feels like going backwards, and your real speed usually goes up, because you stop paying the price of each mistake twice.

Finally, start thinking in words rather than letters. Research on skilled typists by Matthew Crump and Gordon Logan found that typists plan at the level of the whole word, with the key presses for a word prepared together. You can encourage this by practising the same short passage several times until each word comes out as one movement, then moving on to fresh text.

80 to 100 WPM and beyond: overlap and stamina

Above 80, there's not much left to gain from moving each finger faster. The gains come from overlapping movements and from holding your speed for longer.

Use rollover on purpose. In common letter groups such as "th", "ing", "ion" and "and", let the next key go down before the last one comes up. It should feel like a roll rather than a series of taps. Don't force it on every pair; it comes naturally on pairs typed by different hands or different fingers. The overlapping key presses figure on your results shows whether it's rising.

Train in bursts, then settle. Do a few 15-second tests at a speed that feels a little reckless, about 10% above your usual, then a 60-second test at your normal pace. The bursts teach your fingers what faster feels like; the longer test checks whether any of it stuck without wrecking your accuracy.

Have a plan for mistakes. At high speed you'll still make errors, and the cost of each one depends on how quickly you recover. Practise noticing a wrong letter, fixing it with the fewest key presses and getting back into rhythm in the same breath, rather than stopping to stare at it.

Type longer and harder texts. Common-word tests are the easiest material there is. Two- to five-minute runs, quotations, text with capitals and punctuation, and a page from a book you're reading all keep your speed honest. A typist who can do 100 on common words and 75 on real text has a real-text problem to work on.

How long does it take?

It varies too much for a single number, and no study has followed a large group of typists from 40 all the way to 100. What's certain is the shape of the curve. Skills like typing improve quickly at first and then more slowly for the same effort; psychologists Allen Newell and Paul Rosenbloom called it the law of practice in 1981. Your first 10 WPM after learning to touch type may come in weeks. The step from 90 to 100 can take many months.

So plan in months, not days. Fifteen to twenty minutes of focused practice on most days of the week is enough to keep improving, and more than about half an hour at a time mostly practises tired fingers. Consistency over a long stretch beats long sessions every time.

Measure progress the right way

Day-to-day scores jump around by several WPM for reasons that have nothing to do with skill: the words you got, the coffee you'd just had, how warm your hands were. If you check every test, you'll see noise and either celebrate or despair at random.

Once a week, at about the same time of day, take five one-minute tests and write down the middle score. That number, the median, is the one to track. Over a month you should see it move. Your profile here also awards a speed badge at every 10 WPM from 30 to 200, which makes each step up feel like a step.

When you stall

A plateau usually means you're still in an earlier band than your speed suggests. An 85 WPM typist at 92% accuracy has a 60-to-80 problem, corrections, not an 80-to-100 problem. A fast typist who still glances down at the number row has an under-40 problem on those keys. Check your accuracy and your results page before you assume you need some advanced trick.

If the basics really are fine, change the material rather than the effort: switch from common words to real text, or from a laptop to a full-size keyboard. Taking two or three days off can help too; a new skill often settles between sessions. And look after the basics around the keyboard, because tired, tense hands are slow hands. The ideas in how to type faster and typing tips and tricks cover the habits that support all of this.

Where to start

Take three one-minute tests today and write down your median speed and accuracy. If accuracy is under 96%, that's your project whatever your speed, and how to improve typing accuracy has a one-week plan for it. Otherwise find your band above and give its one bottleneck two weeks of short daily practice, then test again. When you do get there, see what the very top looks like in the fastest typists in the world.

Sources

• Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson and Oulasvirta, “Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes”, CHI 2018.
• Salthouse, “Effects of age and skill in typing”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113(3), 1984.
• Crump and Logan, “Hierarchical control and skilled typing: evidence for word-level control over the execution of individual keystrokes”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 36(6), 2010.
• Newell and Rosenbloom, “Mechanisms of skill acquisition and the law of practice”, in Cognitive Skills and Their Acquisition, ed. Anderson, 1981.
• Oxford University Press, “The OEC: Facts about the language”, Oxford English Corpus.