Fact · Typing and writing speed
8.4fingers used on average (fast typists)
Fast typists used about 8.4 fingers on average, while slow typists used about 5.3.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“we observe fast typists to use more fingers than slow typists (averaging 8.4 versus 5.3)”
Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes, Vivek Dhakal et al., CHI 2018, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018, Results, Hand and finger use.
Open the original (DOI 10.1145/3173574.3174220)- What it measures
- The paper counts how many different fingers each typist used, averaged over the fast and slow groups.
- What it does not show
- A measure of finger use in the online test, not a test of touch typing training. The authors also found that trained typists use more fingers than untrained ones (about 8 versus 6.5).