Talk:Words per minute

Skip to table of contents

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Words per minute article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Contradiction in Speaking Speeds

The article reads: "Policy debaters often speak 350 to 400 words per minute, while Conversations are maintained at around 200 wpm, and although research by Ronald Carver has demonstrated that adults can listen with full comprehension at 300 wpm, even auctioneers can only speak at about 250 wpm." So policy debaters speak faster than auctioneers? This doesn't sound right. Justin Bacon 17:58, 23 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Keyboard Types

It would be helpful to list what keyboards these were achieved on. I'm told someone proficient with a DVORAK keyboard can type usually faster than someone on a QWERTY keyboard, which is what most people use The snare (talk) 08:12, 13 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Have you ever seen a national level debate round? - 75.17.149.251 (talk) 16:36, 22 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Removed. The citation in policy debate does not support this statement, and the the auctioneer statement is a cited contradiction. Ajonlime (talk) 01:08, 12 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Readded. See Talk:Policy debate#Speed for more citations. And, btw, the auctioneer statement is uncited, not to mention the fact that I don't even see the contradiction. From [1], "although research by Ronald Carver has demonstrated that adults can listen with full comprehension at 300 wpm, even auctioneers can only speak at about 250 wpm". That auctioneers can't, as a general (uncited) rule, speak faster than 250 wpm doesn't mean that policy debaters are similarly limited. TerraFrost 20:09, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Handwriting speed

I am trying to find out what speed of WPM is as fast or faster than handwriting. It's important for my application of word processing in my classroom. Does anyone know?

I think it depends on how fast the particular person's handwriting is. For example, someone doing a penmanship exercise painstakingly will be much slower than, say, a reporter interviewing a fast-talking person. 202.156.6.54 10:01, 17 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You can find some information if you search for average handwriting speed in any search engine. In particular, this paper seems very interesting. — LazyEditor (talk) 05:05, 19 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I believe the top speed for cursive writing is about 35 wpm. --Ross UK 21:19, 8 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree; I timed myself just now and I write 37 wpm, quite legibly although far from neat. 218.186.9.3 10:16, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I am trying to find out what speed of WPM is as fast or faster than handwriting. It's important for my application of word processing in my classroom. Does anyone know?

I'm a German Gymnasium teacher giving Keyboarding as a elective subject. Since 2005 I've been testing the handwriting of my students to motivate for typing quicker than handwriting. They have to write for three minutes as quick as possible (not beautiful!) a sentence of 84 characters (incl. spaces) with every letter minimum once contained repeatedly. The mean values show: 5th Graders 100 - 120 cpm; 6th Graders 120 - 130 cpm; 9th Grader 160 - 170 cpm. (First item fall course, second item spring course.) There are huge deviatons, examples: 5th Grader min. 65 cpm, max. 166 cpm; 6th Grader min. 79, max. 159 cpm; 9th Grader: min. 129 cpm, max. 205 cpm. 5th, 6th, and 9th Grade each several hundred students, other grades I've only a few. I tested some grown up people, mostly teachers: average 160 - 180 cpm, record 228 cpm. (Notes: In German wpm makes no sense. I take indeed cpm, not the German "Anschlaege".) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gehrd (talk • contribs) 14:46, 27 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Supplement: Bart Pisha (1993) wrote in his dissertation that the speed of handwriting is the minimum speed for automated finger movements when typing. In my experience it is 20 - 25 % above because of then decreasing typing errors obvious. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gehrd (talk • contribs) 09:47, 28 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Sign language speed, handedness in typing

What about the reported, analyzed, tested speeds of sign languages? Are they faster than speaking?

What about typing with only one hand? Does handedness (right- or left-handed) influence typing speed with only one hand or typing with both hands? Mirror image of the keyboard? 134.76.210.207 (talk) 10:25, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Length of a word

It says it needs cited. Would AVG word length work? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.69.40.181 (talk) 12:12, 11 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Dubious

Why Afrikaans and French? it doesn't make very much sense —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.235.3.230 (talk) 21:28, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to be for purposes of example, it could very well say that the speed of a German-speaking operator in Berlin can be compared to an Indonesian-speaking operator in Jakarta. Provided the speakers are using the same alphabet (which Afrikaans, French, German, and Indonesian do) they can be compared. --192.127.94.7 (talk) 15:26, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Does this matter though? Simply saying it allows one to compare typing speed between languages should be sufficient, shouldn't it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.195.152.227 (talk) 16:05, 20 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I should think it is because of the differences between the average length of an Afrikaans word and the average length of a French word, though I don't know if there really is a large difference. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.189.225.136 (talk) 15:30, 14 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I am going to remove this now. It is copied and pasted from a source website that does not read anything like an encyclopedia. The example is much too specific in my opinion. Vladmirfish (talk) 22:06, 11 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

WHY?

The article's author makes some assumption that comparisons among typists performing in different languages and even different locations are pertinent. Why? I could understand the need to compare typists for job hiring measures just as you could compare house painters by their performance abilities. In this case, the language and equipment should be comparable (I do not see the location as important). It would seem the confused author is relating such measures as pressure, temperature, etc. and in this case, it is simply not needed. No one would consider hiring a typist (is that still a profession) that could not type in a specific language. Simply delete the statement as a final solution. I Need Knowledge (talk) 21:07, 10 July 2011 (UTC) William R[reply]

I can see how someone who makes an international study would want to compare people from different countries that speak different languages. Jiiimbooh (talk) 08:49, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Frankly...

Just to be anal about it (what are encyclopedias for, anyway?) it really doesn't matter that the French speaker is in Paris, or the German speaker is in Berlin. The French speaking communicator could be in Hong Kong - it won't affect results any. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.218.90.247 (talk) 20:34, 8 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What matters is that the french speaker is typing french. 213.161.190.227 (talk) 10:45, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

No shit. Given that that is the unavoidable implication of the line "The French speaking communicator" in the above comment one can only assume you're being needlessly critical in an effort to out "anal" the previous commentator. But, hey, this is Wikipedia where the usual dick measuring associated with pseudo-anonymity has been sublimated into an elaborate farce of clumsy pedantry and petty bickering.

dubious comprehension figures

The figures stated for reading comprehension seems wildly off the wall, especially considering the normal reading speed mentioned three lines before. Reading for comprehension is always markedly slower than reading prose, so comprehension speeds up to 3 times higher than normal speeds seems blatantly false.

Not to mention the fact that Reading at 1000 wpm is the same as reading a normal 300 page book in less than 2 hours... Obbas (talk) 13:58, 1 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Advertising

"The average American adult reads prose text at 250 to 300 words per minute, and with use of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), the speeds can quickly exceed 400 wpm and reach 800 wpm after an hour of practice.[3]"

This sounds very much like advertising to me. Please remove. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.85.250.135 (talk) 17:14, 16 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that there's a lot of advertising-speak in the articles related to speed-reading, but RSVP is actually not a commercial product but just the name for a technique. There are in fact several opensource/free software programs available to present texts in this manner. I think there's even a Firefox extension that does it.

A claim of 800wpm is really quite high, not impossible, but rather improbable to attain within just an hour of practice--especially considering 800wpm was the limit the FTC allowed speedreader Howard Stephen Berg to claim how much it would improve people's reading speeds by following his entire program. Unless, I dunno, playing one hour with a free software RSVP reader really does yield the same results as Berg's expensive program. Would be kinda cool.

BTW my personal experience in experimenting with RSVP readers is that it tires out my poor little mind rather quickly. So even if it would allow me to read twice as fast, I'd have to spend any extra time gained with viewing Youtube videos of people's funny pets, in order to relax a little. 94.212.58.194 (talk) 15:42, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Are the figures accurate?

I get around 60 WPM and I'm by no means an expert typist. 82.139.86.160 (talk) 19:11, 13 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, these numbers are fishy. I'd put them more in the ballpark of 70wpm. Adding a "citation needed". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.5.205.172 (talk) 13:07, 1 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There is some data on this out there. As far as I can tell, a lot of it goes back to the heyday of the typewriter. Names like Salthouse come to mind. Stephen Jay Gould also wrote an interesting essay on the QWERTY keyboard as a technological example of the panda's thumb - something that is sub-optimal but functional enough to be selected for ('nature' selecting one, and market forces selecting the other). The QWERTY keyboard arose at a time when various mechanical typewriters were entering the market.

A major selection factor was that when people typed at high speeds, keys tended to jam. If you've ever used a mechanical typewriter, you'll have experienced this - as has anyone who has typed, or tried to type (I owned a typewriter years ago. Couldn't type back then. Could jam the keys though!). The QWERTY layout actually slowed down the rate at which people could type, and in the process, reduced the rate of key-jamming. So it became the dominant keyboard layout, because the limiting factor in typing speed was the rate at which mechanical typewriters could operate without jamming, with QWERTY being a workable compromise between human typing capacity and mechanical capacity. Nowadays the limiting factor of keys jamming does not exist. The limiting factor is now the QWERTY layout, with most speed records being held by a different layout. The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard as far as I'm aware.

From the literature I perused some years ago, somewhere around 100wpm was considered fast in the workplace. 60-70wpm is good, and faster than most. So you'd stand out. What the distribution is, I don't know. Nor what shape the distribution is. A distribution reflecting the population of people who type would probably be right skewed ('normal' or bell-curve distributions often being an artifact of statistical massaging and study designs). There'll be data out there. There always is, because if we ask that sort of question, it's always certain someone else has, especially if the data are readily obtainable. However, 100wpm would be above average, as probably is 60wpm. 120wpm, as mentioned in this article, would not be impossible. But it would be an outlier on QWERTY keyboard layouts. I may add a citation if I find one. Personally, I'd find 120wpm believable (but an outlier) re QWERTY, but if reading mention of very high typing speeds, I'd want to know if the writer was knowingly citing QWERTY, or citing speeds attained on other layouts If you're reading this page, go look up Gould's essay. It's called The Panda's Thumb of Technology, in Bully for Brontosaurus. It's well worth reading, would easily provide some material for this article, and would point you in the direction of material to look up. Meantime, I've accidentally hit a key combination on my keyboard, and done something silly with my computer screen (true story), so I'm off. Wotnow (talk) 20:42, 22 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I find myself seriously doubting that the numbers given in the article are at all accurate. I'm more or less a two finger typist (occasionally but not often using my ring finger and pinky), and I actually don't use shift while typing, instead preferring to tap Caps Lock on and then off even if only for a single letter. I've never had typing education nor do I practice, and I'm not a professional typist, and I can easily get 90wpm, and on a good day 110 wpm, with no errors, on my QWERTY keyboard. I can even break 120 wpm , although this usually results in a typo per paragraph of text or so. I would not recommend using the numbers in the article as a guide to how fast typists are / what the average is. I am aware of how Wikipedia works though, the goal is verifiability, not truth, so unless somebody can find a more reasonable reliable source the figures in the article will have to stay the same. DeutscherStahl (talk) 23:50, 17 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The sources for this article are in general unsatisfactory. Most are not from academic or well respected publications, do not come from authors with verifiable expertise, and/or are not directly relevant to the subject. For example, the average speeds typists of varying skill levels can achieve is cited from a text on microeconomics, which itself provides no further source. Thus I am putting up a verification warning at the top of the page until better sources can be provided. Also, I propose we remove the aforementioned bit on average typing speeds unless a more suitable source is found. I understand that Wikipedia is a place of verifiability and not truth, but we do at least have (admittedly ambiguous) standards on source reliability that must be met. --BBUCommander (talk) 01:07, 3 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Guys, have you stopped to consider whether the regular contributor to Wikipedia is a good example of the average computer user? When measuring average typing speeds they will include a lot of people that only use the computer occasionally as well as daily users. That said, the figures are probably slightly out-of-date, as they are from 1999, and a lot of young people who grew up using computers will have reached adult age since then. Jiiimbooh (talk) 18:51, 30 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It would be interesting to know if the people further up the page were typing their own thoughts, or copying from a sheet of paper (or from a dictation). I type much faster when I'm writing something than when I'm transcribing, and I surmise that the sources will be for transcription typing, which might explain why the figures seem so low. Having said that, the provided source that gives 120 WPM as an exceptional typing speed isn't very good; it appears to be an aside from a book about macroeconomics. I wouldn't trust an economist to give me advice about economics, let alone typing. -Ashley Pomeroy (talk) 14:07, 19 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

CJKV characters ?

How can a conversation between their wpm (ref: Chinese input methods for computers)and usual latin typing being facilitate?C933103 (talk) 17:12, 9 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Removed Morse vs SMS

The original text of claimed that a Morse code sender won a speed competition with an SMS user.

The citation for this was http://www.engadget.com/2005/05/06/morse-code-trumps-sms-in-head-to-head-speed-texting-combat/ in which it was claimed that the morse code operator "delivered a resounding ass-whoopin' to his rival", but no times were listed.

Engadget linked to its source: http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2005/05/008191.htm which gave no numbers and only speed claim was a quote from its source which said "morse code is still faster at sending text".

The textually.org cited as its source http://www.160characters.org/news.php?action=view&nid=1541 which offered the aforementioned quote as its summary, but in the details says:

Just 90 seconds after [the sending Morse code operator] began transmitting, [the receiving Morse code operator] announced that he had the message received and written down correctly. It took another 18 seconds for [the SMS sender]'s message to reach the mobile phone belonging to her friend.

in which the only measured times offered include the transmission and decode time rather than being about the keying time, which is what this wikipedia article is about. No information about just the keying time is given in the 160characters.org article

The 160characters.org article gives as its source an article in The Times; the link is dead, but it is presumably this article: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article1918226.ece but it is behind a paywall so it is unclear whether it offers any more specific data. But it is clear that neither the originally cited source or any of the currently reachable sources offer any evidence that the wpm keying numbers were faster.

For this reason I have removed the sentence describing this contest. 24.22.185.207 (talk) 03:52, 13 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Why is there a handwriting section?

It seems silly and is outside the scope of this page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.192.150.41 (talk) 02:26, 12 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think it is very relevant and also provides a valuable point for comparison 94.219.185.18 (talk) 23:21, 16 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Handwriting section is really useful and I would actually like to see it extended. I don't see why it shouldn't be here? Word per minutes doesn't say about the input format, and I think the article should describe different input types and what WPM can be achieved with that method. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.144.95.201 (talk) 22:23, 29 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Ultimate Typing Championship/Sean Wrona

Should the Ultimate Typing Championship (and Sean Wrona's achievement) be mentioned in this article? The stuff about Wrona looks suspiciously like self-promotion (or the work of a zealous Wrona fan). I'm not convinced that the Ultimate Typing Championship (only held once in 2010 in spite of an attempt to continue it in 2011) is a particularly notable contest. Surely there are other equally (non)-noteworthy typing contests held all the time. There is a fairly recent (2005) Guiness World Record for typing speed mentioned, which I'm inclined to treat as the most credible typing speed record in the absence of any ongoing organized typing competitions.Plantdrew (talk) 03:33, 30 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Shift/modifier keys?

The header currently reads:

..."I run" is one word,...

Doesn't the fact that there are two keystrokes required to produce an "I" (shift + i) make that a six character phrase, and therefore more than one word? - eykanal talk 17:07, 8 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ratatype links are not reliable as they admit they rely on Wikipedia itself for their information.

[www.ratatype.com/learn/average-typing-speed/ Ratatype] is no way a reliable source for typing statististics. Its self-identified sources are listed as "adwords.google.com", "www.alexa.com", and this article. It lists this article as a source for the statistics! We can't use a second-hand link to this article as reliable source for this article. I removed it before for these stated reasons with direction to bring it to the talk page if there was an argument for using it in the article. It was added without discussion. I'm going to remove it until we have a discussion or a consensus to include it again. __ E L A Q U E A T E 20:35, 23 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Elaqueate I was wondering if the following link may be unblocked. We wrote a pages about education site https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Draft_talk:Ratatype.com/sandbox

The main source is google organic. You can check.

You've already made requests in the correct places. Elaqueate's position that this is not in any way a reliable source is correct. Kuru (talk) 13:24, 23 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Elaqueate and Kuru

Here are screenshots of 6 months for the main source with Google Analytics http://take.ms/t4FUI

The main source is Google Organic and Direct. Data from Alexa http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ratatype.com Data from SimilarWeb https://www.similarweb.com/website/ratatype.com#overview So we can't publishing our article on wiki https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Draft:Ratatype.com

What else to provide data that would show, ratatype.com site - is a reliable? What we need to do?

Abbreviation

For now "words per minute" and "characters per minutes" are abbreviated inconsistently either in lower case or upper case. We should decide what way is appropriate throughout the article. But I'm more inclined to respell these abbreviations in full.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 15:38, 26 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Completeness Issues

Overall this is a great article. Very informative and thoroughly readable. A perfect example one of those entries that can really pull you in and before you know it you've read every word. I got to thinking that I'd also really like to know the wpm rates of traditional handwriting or typing methods, etc. stack up against emerging methods such as speech-to text and eye-movement recognition devices or software.

And is the appropriate place to post this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Andysseus (talk • contribs) 05:34, 7 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]