Characters per minute to words per minute

Type either number and see the other. One word is five characters, spaces included, so 200 characters per minute is 40 words per minute.

Measure your speed

Common speeds

Why five characters make a word

Words differ in length, so typing speed counts every five characters, spaces and punctuation included, as one word. That way a speed means the same amount of typing whatever the text: forty words per minute is two hundred characters a minute, whether the words were short or long. Most typing tests, job adverts and teachers give speed in words per minute; some tests and countries count characters or key presses instead, which is why both units are worth knowing.

Characters, keystrokes and key depressions

Characters per minute counts the characters in the finished text. Keystrokes per minute counts every key you pressed, including Backspace and the keys you typed again while fixing mistakes, so it comes out a little higher than characters per minute for the same typing. Government typing tests in India count key depressions per hour, which is the same idea as characters per minute, times sixty: 200 characters a minute is 12,000 an hour. Korean typing tests count key presses too, which they call 타수: one Hangul syllable is two to four presses, so a Korean speed in key presses looks much higher than a speed in characters.

What a good speed looks like

The average typist in a large study of 168,960 people typed about 52 words per minute, which is 260 characters per minute. Two hundred characters a minute (40 WPM) is enough for most office work, and 300 to 400 characters a minute (60 to 80 WPM) is fast. Speed only counts when the text is right, so look at accuracy too: a test that shows both, and how much of your time went on fixing mistakes, tells you more than speed alone. If you want to know how long a whole document takes at your speed, use the typing time calculator.