Fact · Typing and writing speed
51.56words per minute
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.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“The average WPM value for participants is 51.56 (SD = 20.2).”
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
- About 168,000 volunteers took an online typing test, and the paper analyzes the keystroke logs from those sessions.
- What it does not show
- Self-selected volunteers who took a test online, so frequent typists are over-represented and the average is higher than the population figure. Population averages are covered in the typing speed pillar.
Source
Used to calculate
- 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.
- In the online typing study, 100 words per minute is about 2.4 standard deviations above the average typist.
- In the online typing study, 30 words per minute is about 1.1 standard deviations below the average typist.
- In the online typing study, 50 words per minute is about 0.08 standard deviations below the average typist.
- At 51.56 words per minute, 60 characters (12 words of five characters) take about 14.0 seconds to type on a keyboard.
- In the online typing study, 60 words per minute is about 0.4 standard deviations above the average typist.
- In the online typing study, 80 words per minute is about 1.4 standard deviations above the average typist.
- A four-character abbreviation such as sig and a space takes about 0.9 seconds at 51.56 words per minute.
- Average phone typing in the Palin study, 36.2 words per minute, is about 30 percent slower than average desktop typing in the Dhakal study, 51.56 words per minute.
- The silent reading rate for non-fiction is about 4.6 times the keyboard typing average from the online study. The figures come from different samples.
- The overall conversational speaking rate is about 3.8 times the keyboard typing average from the online study. The figures come from different samples.
- The 78 WPM threshold for the top tenth of typists is about 1.5 times the online average of 51.56 WPM.
- The 360 words per minute steno record is about seven times the 51.56 words per minute average in a large online typing test.
- At the online average of 51.56 words per minute, a typist enters about 15,468 characters in an hour, counting five characters per word.
- Adults read silently at 238 words per minute, about 4.6 times the 51.56 words per minute average of the large online typing study.
- The 225 words per minute testimony standard is about 4.4 times the 51.56 words per minute average in an online typing test.
- Against the 51.56 words per minute average in the 2018 online keyboard study, 153 words per minute is about 3.0 times as fast. The two studies have different participants and tasks, so this is arithmetic, not a measured comparison.
- At the average online typing speed of 51.56 words per minute, typing 1,000 words takes about 19.4 minutes of pure typing time.
- The average online typing speed is about 2.3 times the mean handwriting copying speed of university students in one 2014 study.
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