How to Type Faster: Techniques, Drills and Real WPM Numbers

If you want to know how to type faster, the answer is short: keep your eyes off the keyboard, use the same finger for each key every time, slow down until you're accurate, and practise 10 to 15 minutes a day on real words. The average adult types about 52 words per minute, according to a study of 168,000 typists, so most people have room to climb. Below: what counts as a good speed, how to measure yours, the techniques that actually move the number, the shortcuts that beat raw speed, a four-week plan, your setup, and the one speed-up that isn't typing at all.

The short version:

1. Know the benchmark: around 52 wpm is average on a computer, and 70 or more is generally quick.
2. Take three one-minute tests, average them, and write the number down.
3. Learn touch typing if you look at the keys. If you already type blind, refine what you have.
4. Prioritise accuracy, keep each key on one finger, and read a word ahead.
5. Learn the word-jumping shortcuts. They save more time than an extra 10 wpm.
6. Practise 10 to 15 minutes a day for four weeks, then retest.

What is a good typing speed?

A good typing speed on a computer is anything above about 52 words per minute, which is the average in one of the largest typing studies ever run. Researchers at Aalto University and Cambridge collected 136 million keystrokes from 168,000 volunteers. It's the best number available, and it's higher than most people guess.

Here's how the figures stack up:

Reading those numbers as rough bands: under about 40 wpm is below average, 50 to 60 is normal, 70 and up is quick, and 100 or more is rare. Those bands are our reading of the data, so treat them as a guide.

You'll often see "the average typing speed is 40 wpm" quoted as fact. It rarely comes with a source. The biggest study anyone has run says 52.

One more caveat. Typing tests measure copying, and copying is easier than composing. When you write an email you stop to think, rephrase and delete, so your real-world speed sits well below your test score. That's normal, and it's worth knowing before you get annoyed with yourself.

Measure your baseline first

You can't tell whether practice works without a starting number, so get one today.

Typing tests count a "word" as five characters, spaces included, which stops "a" and "establishment" counting the same. Most report two figures. Gross WPM is everything you typed; net WPM takes off a word for each uncorrected error. Type 80 words in a minute with 10 mistakes and your net speed is 70. Net is the number that matters.

To get a fair baseline:

• Do three one-minute tests on a free site such as monkeytype.com, typing.com or 10fastfingers.com.
• Average the three. A single test flatters or punishes you depending on the text.
• Note your accuracy as well as your speed. Aim for 95% or better before you start chasing pace.

Write the result somewhere you'll find it. Then retest once a week. Daily tests mostly measure how tired you are.

What is touch typing (and do you need all ten fingers)?

Touch typing means typing without looking at the keys. Your fingers rest on the home row (A, S, D, F for the left hand; J, K, L and semicolon for the right), the small bumps on F and J tell you where you are without looking, and each finger owns a column of keys above and below its home position.

That's the textbook version. The research is more relaxed about it.

Self-taught typists with odd habits can be just as fast as people who took a course. Aalto University researchers filmed 30 everyday typists ranging from 34 to 79 wpm with motion capture in 2016. The self-taught ones used six fingers on average, and Anna Feit, one of the researchers, said they "performed at similar average speed and accuracy" to the trained group. The untrained group did spend about twice as long looking at their fingers, though.

The number of fingers didn't predict speed. Three habits did: using the same finger for the same key every time, preparing the next keystroke before the current one lands, and keeping hand movement small.

So the practical verdict depends on where you're starting:

• You hunt and peck (two fingers, eyes on the keys): learn proper touch typing. Looking down is what's capping you, and fixing it is easier with a system than without one.
• You already type 50 wpm or more without looking, even with a quirky six-finger style: keep it and refine it. Rebuilding from scratch costs weeks for a gain that may never arrive.

For what it's worth, two popular YouTube typists, Ali Abdaal and Gareth Evans, both say they skip their little fingers for letters. Nobody is checking.

How to type faster: 7 techniques that work

These are ordered roughly by impact. If you only do two, do the first two.

Stop looking at the keyboard

Every glance down costs time, and you lose your place on the screen too. The Aalto study found that untrained typists spent about twice as long looking at their fingers as trained ones.

The fix is crude and it works: cover your hands. Drape a tea towel or a cloth over them while you practise. If you need a reminder of where keys live, keep a keyboard diagram on screen and look at that. It's slow and irritating for a few days. That's the point.

Slow down until you are accurate

This sounds backwards. It isn't. The Cambridge and Aalto researchers found that faster typists make fewer mistakes, which tells you speed and accuracy grow together.

Every error costs you the wrong keystroke, the backspace, and the right keystroke, plus the half-second where you notice something's off. Type at the pace where you hit 95% accuracy or more. The speed comes once your fingers stop second-guessing.

Use the same finger for the same key, every time

This was one of the three habits that predicted speed in the Feit study. If your index finger sometimes takes T and sometimes your middle finger does, your hand has to decide each time. Consistency turns a decision into a reflex.

It doesn't have to be the textbook assignment. It just has to be the same assignment.

Read one word ahead

Slow typists read a word, type it, then read the next one. Fast typists keep their eyes a word or two ahead of their fingers, so there's no pause between words. The YouTuber Mr Chops recommends exactly this: read the next word while you type the current one.

It feels like juggling at first. It also lines up with the research finding that fast typists prepare their next keystroke early.

Move less and let keys overlap

Fast typists press the next key before releasing the last one. This is called rollover, and the fastest typists in the Aalto/Cambridge study used it for 40 to 70% of their keystrokes.

You can't force rollover directly. What you can do is keep your hands close to the home row, reach with fingers instead of moving the whole hand, and come back to F and J after every stretch. Smaller movements leave room for the overlap to happen on its own.

Drill your weakest letters

Most people have three or four keys that trip them up, and they rarely know which. Free trainers such as keybr.com track your speed letter by letter and feed you more of the ones you're slow on. Ali Abdaal recommends this kind of targeted practice in his typing video.

Ten minutes on your worst letters does more than ten minutes on text you can already type comfortably.

Practise real words, not random letters

Drills of "fjfj jfjf" have their place in week one. After that, switch to real words. Sites such as 10fastfingers offer a "top 200 words" test, built from the words you type most often anyway. Then move on to real text: an article, an old email, a page of a book.

Your fingers learn patterns like "the", "ing" and "tion" as single movements, and you only get those patterns from real words.

Shortcuts that save more time than extra WPM

For most people, the quickest gain is editing speed. Ali Abdaal puts it bluntly in his video: "anytime you're finding yourself pressing backspace more than twice you're probably doing it wrong".

Learn these and you'll stop tapping backspace like a woodpecker:

Apple notes that these shortcuts may work differently in some apps, and Microsoft documents its Ctrl versions for Word. They're worth learning anyway: you'll use them in your browser, your email and your notes app.

The other big one is text replacement. On a Mac, go to Apple menu > System Settings > Keyboard > Text Replacements and click Add. Type a short trigger, such as "@@", and the full text it should become. Ali Abdaal's rule is to make a snippet for anything you type more than twice. His examples are his email address, his VAT number and a stock reply to YouTube comments; yours might be a postal address or a sign-off. It takes two minutes to set up and pays you back every day.

A four-week plan to increase typing speed

Ten or fifteen minutes a day, every day, for a month. That's the whole commitment. Short daily sessions suit this kind of skill better than one long weekly slog, because what you're building is a reflex.

How much faster will you get? Nobody can promise a number, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. A couple of individual accounts give a sense of the range.

Gareth Evans says in his video that "even 10 minutes a day is plenty". When he switched to proper fingering, he dropped below 30 wpm, then passed 100 within a week, by his account. He also mentions his index fingers aching after 10 to 15 minutes of hunt and peck, which is a decent argument for switching on its own.

Ali Abdaal describes a colleague going from 60 to 90 wpm with 10 minutes a day for about a month.

Those are anecdotes from motivated people, so treat them as possibilities. The realistic expectation if you're moving from hunt and peck to touch typing: you'll get slower for a week or two before you get faster. That dip is where a lot of people give up. Push through it.

Keyboard, layout and setup

Does a mechanical keyboard make you faster?

There's no good evidence that it does. Ali Abdaal, who types around 157 wpm by his own account, says he's faster on Apple's low-travel Magic Keyboard than on mechanical boards, where he gets about 145 to 150. Buy a mechanical keyboard if you enjoy it. Pick whatever feels comfortable for long sessions, and don't expect it to fix your technique.

Should you switch to Dvorak or Colemak?

Not for speed alone. Alternative layouts have their fans, but switching means relearning from zero and then fumbling on every QWERTY keyboard you meet: work laptops, a friend's computer, the library. Ali Abdaal also thinks they aren't worth it. If comfort or strain is the reason, that's a different conversation.

Set up your desk so you can type for longer

Speed doesn't help much if your wrists give up after an hour. Set your chair so your elbows sit at about keyboard height, hanging comfortably at your sides, as OSHA recommends. That keeps your wrists straight instead of bent up, down or sideways, which OSHA says to avoid.

Fold the little feet under your keyboard away if they tip your wrists back; OSHA says to skip them if they increase wrist bending. If you use a wrist rest, pick a soft one, because a hard edge digs into the underside of your wrist all day. And move. Ali Abdaal's rule is to change position every 30 to 60 minutes, which is easier than chasing the perfect posture.

There's more detail in our typing ergonomics guide, and if it already hurts, read wrist pain from typing.

Why you plateau (and what to do)

Stalling after a few weeks is common, and it usually has one of four causes:

• Same test text every day. You've memorised it. Switch sources or use a random word mode.
• Speed over accuracy. Your number hides a lot of backspacing. Do a few sessions where accuracy is the only goal.
• Hidden weak keys. You don't know which ones they are. Let keybr find them.
• Looking down for numbers and symbols. The letters went blind but the top row didn't. Drill the number row and punctuation with your hands covered.

The biggest speed-up for writing isn't typing

Once you've done all of the above, you'll hit a ceiling, and it's lower than the speed you talk at. The average typist manages 52 wpm. The average English speaker talks at about 150 words per minute, roughly three times faster.

A Stanford study with 32 participants found speech was 3.0 times faster than typing on an iPhone keyboard in English, with a 20.4% lower error rate. That was on phones with short phrases, so it's no direct verdict on a desktop keyboard, but the gap is big enough to take seriously.

The practical upshot: for first drafts, emails, messages and long AI prompts, dictation will save more time than any amount of typing practice. Keep the keyboard for editing, code and open-plan offices where talking to your laptop would earn you looks. Try the speaking speed test to see your own speaking rate next to your typing score.

Your computer may already have what you need. Here's how to use speech to text on a Mac, and our roundup of the best voice typing apps covers the rest.

If you want dictation in every app on a Mac, Blazing Transcribe is ours, so weigh that accordingly. It's free: hold fn, talk, let go, and the text lands wherever your cursor is. Speech recognition runs on your Mac, so it works offline. It needs macOS 15 or later on Apple Silicon, and there's an early Windows version too (it isn't code-signed yet, so Windows shows a warning when you install it).

FAQ

How can I increase my typing speed fast?

Stop looking at the keys, slow down until you hit 95% accuracy, and practise 10 to 15 minutes a day on real words to increase your typing speed. Learning the delete-word and move-by-word shortcuts gives you a faster win than any drill.

Is 40 WPM a good typing speed?

A 40 WPM typing speed is a little below average, though perfectly good enough. One of the largest studies of typists put the average at 52 wpm, so there's clear room to improve.

How long does it take to learn touch typing?

For many people, learning touch typing takes roughly a month of 10 to 15 minutes a day to feel comfortable, with the first week or two slower than your old speed. One YouTuber's colleague went from 60 to 90 wpm in about a month at 10 minutes a day; your mileage will vary.

Do I need to use all ten fingers to type fast?

No, you don't need to use all ten fingers. In an Aalto University study, self-taught typists used six fingers on average and matched trained typists for speed and accuracy. Using the same finger for each key, and not looking down, mattered more.

Is it faster to type or to dictate?

Dictating is usually faster than you can type. People speak at about 150 wpm against an average typing speed of 52, and a Stanford study found speech three times faster than a phone keyboard. Knowing how to type faster still pays off for editing and code; for first drafts, talking wins.