Fast Typing Practice: Random Word Speed Drills

Fast Typing Practice

Fifty random common words with no capitals and no punctuation. A pure speed drill for your fingers.

How fast can you type random words?

Fifty common words, no capitals and no punctuation. The clock starts on your first key and stops at the last letter.

A drill built for speed

Press Start test and 50 random common words appear, all lowercase, with no punctuation. The clock starts on your first key and stops at the last letter. Your score is WPM multiplied by accuracy, and this drill keeps its own history in Your scores, separate from the sentence test.

With no Shift key and no commas to slow you down, this is the closest the site gets to measuring raw finger speed. That makes it the right place to work on the things fast typists do differently.

Rollover typing

Slow typists press a key, let it go, then press the next. Fast typists overlap them. The next finger is already going down while the last one is still coming up. The 2018 study of 168,000 volunteers by Aalto University and the University of Cambridge found this overlap among the fastest typists.

You cannot switch rollover on by deciding to. It grows out of repetition. Random common words help because the same short words and letter pairs keep coming back. As you type them, try to let the next finger start moving before the current key is fully released. Use a light touch. Keys that are pounded to the bottom are harder to overlap.

Read ahead

In a sentence, grammar hints at the next word. In a random list, nothing does. Each word arrives as a surprise, so you have to see it before your fingers need it. Try to have your eyes on the next word as soon as you start typing the current one. If you catch yourself pausing at every space, your eyes are too close to your fingers.

A push and recover session

Speed grows when you briefly type faster than is comfortable, then settle back to a pace you control.

Baseline. One run at your normal pace. Note the score.
Push. Two runs a little faster than feels safe. Accept some red.
Recover. One run at a controlled pace, aiming for clean accuracy.

Over time, the recover run creeps up toward the push runs.

Carry the speed into real text

Word lists usually score higher than sentences. To see how much of your new speed survives capitals and punctuation, take the main typing test after a session. For a speed workout with a finish line, try racing the cars in typing practice games.

Fast Typing Practice FAQ

Why practice speed with random words?

Random common words remove capitals and punctuation, so every keystroke is a letter or a space. That gives you more repetitions of the letter patterns that make up most typing.

What is rollover typing?

Pressing the next key before you have fully released the previous one. The 2018 Aalto University and University of Cambridge study found that the fastest typists used it.

Will practicing for speed make me less accurate?

It can if you push past the point of control. The fastest typists in the same study also made fewer errors, so watch the accuracy figure and ease off when red appears.