Fact · Typing and writing speed
5characters per word
The 2018 online typing study defines one word as any five characters when it computes words per minute.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“where one word consists of any five characters”
Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes, Vivek Dhakal et al., CHI 2018, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018, Performance Measures.
Open the original (DOI 10.1145/3173574.3174220)- What it measures
- The same definition is used in the paper's WPM formula, which divides the transcribed length by the time from the first to the last keypress.
- What it does not show
- The study's sentences were transcribed from memory, so the rule describes scoring, not how the typists composed the text.