Test Your Typing Speed With This Free App

Hoo boy, I just got my heart rate up with a typing test. At 10FastFingers, you can test your typing speed in most major and European languages, measure yourself against other typists in your language, and compete in real-time in English.

Like the famous site Typeracer, 10FastFingers matches you randomly with other typers, and you can watch everyone’s progress typing out the same passage. But unlike Typeracer, which uses passages from books, 10FastFingers uses apparently random strings of common words. This will probably slow your typing, as you can’t mentally string the words together into bigger chunks, to type in long bursts.

If you want to type real passages instead of random words, you can paste in your own document to practice. So you could grab a book from Project Gutenberg and practice typing with Pride and Prejudice. You can also enter a custom word list and the site will randomize it for you. It will even repeat words so you can type as many words as possible in a specific time limit.

There’s an upside to typing random words. Because they don’t mean anything, they’re not distracting. That won’t improve your typing speed, but if you’re fast enough (say 70 wpm or more), you might find the test relaxing, even meditative. You might get hooked. And if you switch to a real writing task after, you might find yourself typing faster—kind of like the weird feeling when you start walking after riding a bike.

10FastFingers (via Useful Interweb)

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