How words a minute is counted, and why sites disagree.
A word is five characters. How words per minute, raw speed, accuracy and consistency are worked out, and why typing sites give different scores.
By Suraj Kumar5 min read
Type the same text on three typing sites and you can get three different speeds. They all say words a minute, but they count different things. Here is how KeepSimp counts, why, and what other sites do differently.
A word is five characters.
Real words are of every length, so typing speed counts every five characters as one word, spaces and punctuation included. The habit goes back to the typing contests of the early 1900s. It means a test of long words and one of short words can be compared.
The clock starts with your first key. Researchers take one character off the count for that, since the first key is never timed; typing sites, KeepSimp's included, do not, so their numbers are a little higher on short tests.
Words a minute counts what you typed right.
KeepSimp counts as Monkeytype does, from its source code: the characters of each word you typed right, with the space after it, over five, over the minutes. A word with a mistake left in it counts for nothing. In a timed test, the word you are typing when time runs out counts for the letters you typed right so far.
Raw speed counts every character you left typed, right or wrong, so it shows how fast your fingers moved. The gap between raw and words a minute is what your mistakes cost.
Accuracy counts every key, even the ones you fixed.
Accuracy is the share of keys that typed the right character. Backspace counts neither way, but a mistake you put right still counts as a mistake: it was pressed. That is why accuracy can be 95% while every word in the end is right.
Consistency says how steady your speed was from one second to the next, from 0 to 100. The result shows a chart of every second, with your mistakes marked where they happened.
Why other sites give other numbers.
Some sites subtract a penalty for each wrong word, some count only whole words, some multiply speed by accuracy, and some make you fix every mistake before going on and count Backspace as an error. A test of the 200 most common words gives a higher number than one of passages from books.
None of them is wrong; they measure different things. Compare results on one site, with the same settings. KeepSimp's result says how it counted, and marks a result as not counted when it was too short to mean much, had a long pause, or was too inaccurate.
Further reading
Topics: how is wpm calculated · wpm formula · net wpm · raw wpm · typing accuracy · words per minute calculation
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