Fact · Typing and writing speed
3.8times
Conversational telephone speech averaged 196 words per minute, about 3.8 times the 51.56 words per minute average of the large online typing study.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
- How it is calculated
- 196 / 51.56 = 3.8
Calculated from
- In large corpora of conversational telephone speech in English and Chinese, the overall average rate was 196 words per minute, counting all elapsed time.
- In a study of 136 million keystrokes from an online typing test, the average participant typed 51.56 words per minute, with a standard deviation of 20.2.