How to Calculate Words Per Minute (wpm) Typing Online and Manually

 Using a free website to calculate your words per minute typing

One night I reinstalled the operating system on my wife's computer and she was happy with how much the performance improved! Her mood quickly changed when she found out I deleted her favorite program that she used for typing lessons and tutorials. So I decided to create a free website that would calculate words per minute typing, accuracy and errors. The website can be found at the following link: http://www.now1technologies.com/typetest

Manually calculating your words per minute typing

Define what a word is

If you want to manually calculate your words per minute typing you must first define what a word is. A word is 5 characters or letters including spaces. 

Type for one minute

The next step is to actually type for one minute and then count all the characters that you have typed including spaces.

Calculate the words per minute that you have typed

Once you count all the characters including spaces you must then divide that number by 5 to get the actual words that you have typed in one minute. For example if you typed a paragraph containing 200 characters in one minute then divide 200 by 5 and you get 40 words per minute. A mathematical formula to calculate words per minute would be:

Calculate your typing accuracy

Anyone can randomly press keys on a keyboard for one minute so there must be a way to measure the accuracy of the content that was typed. Creating a formula to calculate the accuracy was by far the hardest part of programming the website I created. After about two sleepless nights in a row I came up with the following formula:

I know this formula looks a bit intimidating but keep reading and it will make sense. In order to use this formula we must first define errors. Errors are the number of differences between what you typed and the original content. For example, take the following two sentences in which the first sentence will represent the original content and the second what you have typed.

I would love to learn how to increase my typing speed.

I would love to laern how to increase mu typing speed.

There are 2 errors or differences between the first and second sentence. Now that we have defined errors lets calculate the accuracy. If you typed 350 characters in one minute and made 4 errors what would be your accuracy? First lets calculate the words per minute which would be 300 / 5 = 60WPM. Now that we have the errors and WPM defined we can put those into the accuracy formula: 100 - ((4 X 100) / 60)) = 93

So if you type 60 words per minute and make 4 errors your accuracy is 93%.