Fact · Typing and writing speed
In a crowd-sourced typing study, keystroke timing correlated with the letter, bigram and trigram frequencies of English text.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“the timing of keystrokes correlates with sequential structure (letter, bigram, and trigram frequencies) in English texts”
Crunching Big Data With Fingertips: How Typists Tune Their Performance Toward the Statistics of Natural Language, Lawrence P. Behmer Jr. and Matthew J. C. Crump, Big Data in Cognitive Science (Routledge), chapter 14, 2016, Abstract.
Open the original- What it measures
- Typists were recruited online, and the chapter analyzes their keystroke timing against the statistics of English.
- What it does not show
- The quoted finding is about the timing between keystrokes, not about words per minute.