Fact · Typing and writing speed
120milliseconds between keystrokes (fast typists)
Fast typists had an average gap of about 120 milliseconds between keystrokes, while slow typists had gaps of over 480 milliseconds.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“For fast typists, the average IKI is ∼120 ms, with a standard deviation of only 11 ms, while slow typists have an IKI of over 480 ms, sometimes as high as 900 ms”
Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes, Vivek Dhakal et al., CHI 2018, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018, Results, Words per minute and inter-key intervals.
Open the original (DOI 10.1145/3173574.3174220)- What it measures
- IKI, the inter-key interval, is the time between one key press and the next. Smaller is faster.
- What it does not show
- Averages across a large online sample of volunteers. The gap is between groups, and individual typists vary.