Fact · Typing and writing speed
3.8times
The overall conversational speaking rate is about 3.8 times the keyboard typing average from the online study. The figures come from different samples.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
- What it measures
- Overall average rate of conversational telephone speech divided by the keyboard average of the online typing study.
- How it is calculated
- 196 / 51.56 = 3.8
- What it does not show
- Conversational speech includes pauses and listening time, and it is not composed text. The ratio is approximate.
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.