What is a good typing speed?

The baseline

The largest study of everyday typing collected 136 million keystrokes from nearly 169,000 participants and found an average of 51.6 words per minute. That is the number to anchor on, because it comes from ordinary people typing on their own keyboards rather than from a self-selected group of enthusiasts.

A word is defined as five characters including spaces, the standard since the 1920s, which makes results comparable across texts and languages.

One finding from that dataset deserves more attention than it gets: professional typists in the 1970s and 1980s averaged 60 to 90 words per minute. We type more than any generation in history and we type more slowly than the people who did it for a living.

Touch typing helps less than you think

In that same dataset, participants who had taken a formal typing course were about five words per minute faster than those who had not — and touch-typing training was not otherwise very predictive of who typed quickly. Self-taught typists using fewer than ten fingers reached comparable speeds with very similar hand behaviour and error patterns.

This is not an argument against learning to touch type. Five words per minute is real, and the study says nothing about comfort or endurance. It is an argument against the idea that finger placement is the thing standing between you and 90 words per minute.

What actually separates fast typists

The strongest predictor in the data is rollover: pressing the next key before releasing the previous one. Fast typists execute 40 to 70 percent of their keystrokes with rollover, and they do it whether or not they were formally trained.

Number of fingers used correlates with speed, but only moderately. Alternating between hands matters more than any individual finger, and letter pairs typed by different hands are more predictive of speed than repeated letters.

Faster typists also make fewer errors, which is the opposite of what most people assume. Slower typists substitute wrong letters more often and then lose additional time correcting them, so accuracy and speed rise together rather than trading off.

Does the layout matter?

There is no good controlled evidence that Dvorak is faster than QWERTY for an experienced typist. The pro-Dvorak case rests largely on a 1944 Navy study of fourteen retrained typists, which Dvorak himself was involved in overseeing, and a 1956 government study failed to replicate it.

In fairness, the researcher who led that 1956 study had publicly opposed alternative layouts before running it. Both of the studies most often cited on this question have a conflict of interest, which is a reasonable summary of the whole field.

For Colemak there is no controlled speed comparison at all. Not weak evidence — no study. Ergonomic comfort is a separate question that none of this evidence addresses.

What does improve typing

A study of sixty experienced typists found something specific and useful. Raw motor ability did not predict typing speed: a finger-tapping test and a perceptual speed test were both unrelated to performance. Nor did having taken a typing class, on its own.

What predicted speed was the combination: people who had taken a typing course and who reported deliberately pushing themselves to type faster during everyday typing. Course without intent produced no measurable effect. The authors’ conclusion was that an everyday activity keeps offering room to improve, but only for someone willing to work at the edge of their ability.

In practice that means the error map at the end of a test is more useful than the headline number. Nearly everyone has a specific hand, row or pair of keys costing them disproportionately, and that is something you can drill.