How is WPM calculated?

TypingTest Pro follows international industrial standards to calculate typing speed in Words per Minute. For written English, the commonly accepted standard is a 5-character standard word, including spaces and punctuation marks. In result calculation this means that five characters typed make one word and - similarly - five characters are deducted for each mistyped word.

Gross typing speed is calculated as follows:
1) Total characters typed are divided by duration, which gives gross speed in characters per minute (CPM)
2) Gross speed in CPM is divided by the standard word length to get typing speed in Words per Minute (WPM).

Gross typing speed is not very useful in determining user's typing skills. It is the error-adjusted values that you should be looking at, i.e. accuracy and net typing speed.

Accuracy percentage is calculated using the standard word length, total characters and error penalty. Error penalty is the number of words typed incorrectly times the word length. Adjusted (net) characters equals total characters minus penalty. The rate of net characters to total characters gives accuracy percentage.

Net typing speed is the typing speed with errors counted in the result and is calculated like this:
1) Total characters minus the number of incorrect words times word length, to get the total net characters for the whole test duration.
2) Total net characters is divided by the test duration to get net typing speed in characters per minute. This is again divided by the standard word length to get net typing speed in words per minute.

Incomplete last word when time runs out is excluded from the calculations.

Calculation Example

A user completes a typing test with 1750 characters in 5 minutes and 5 incorrectly typed words. The results are:

• 1750 total characters, 25 character error penalty (5 words with errors * word length 5), 1725 adjusted characters
• Gross typing speed is 70 WPM (350 CPM)
• Net typing speed is 69 WPM (345 CPM)
• Accuracy is  99% (1725/1750*100%)