Fact · Typing and writing speed
32.1words per minute
In a three-week field study of 30 people typing in their own apps, the mean typing speed was 32.1 words per minute.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“The mean speed was 32.1 WPM.”
ResearchIME: A Mobile Keyboard Application for Studying Free Typing Behaviour in the Wild, Daniel Buschek et al., ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2018), 2018, Typing Speed.
Open the original (DOI 10.1145/3173574.3173829)- What it measures
- Speed was measured on single-character keystrokes only. The paper excludes gestures, suggestions, auto corrections and breaks from the count.
- What it does not show
- Small sample of 30. Because suggestions and corrections are excluded from the count, the figure is not the same as the words a person finishes.