Words per minute (commonly abbreviated as WPM and sometimes lowercased as wpm) is a measure of words processed in a minute, often used as a measurement of the speed of typing, reading or Morse code sending and receiving.
Alphanumeric entry Since words vary in length, for the purpose of measurement of text entry the definition of each "word" is often standardized to be five characters or keystrokes long in English, including spaces and punctuation. For example, under such a method applied to plain English text the phrase "I run" counts as one word, but "rhinoceros" and "let's talk" would both count as two. Karat et al. found in one study of average computer users in 1999 that the average rate for transcription was 32.5 words per minute, and 19.0 words per minute for composition. In the same study, when the group was divided into "fast", "moderate", and "slow" groups, the average speeds were 40 wpm, 35 wpm, and 23 wpm, respectively. With the onset of the era of desktop computers and smartphones, fast typing skills became much more widespread. Using physical keyboards, professional typists type at speeds of 43 to 80 wpm, while some positions can require 80 to 95 (usually the minimum required for dispatch positions and other time-sensitive typing jobs), and some advanced typists work at speeds above 120 wpm. Some typists have sustained speeds over 300 wpm for a 15-second typing test with simple English words. Two-finger typists, sometimes also referred to as "hunt and peck" typists, commonly reach sustained speeds of about 37 wpm for memorized text and 27 wpm when copying text, but in bursts may be able to reach much higher speeds. From the 1920s through the 1970s, typing speed (along with shorthand speed) was an important secretarial qualification, and typing contests were popular and often publicized by typewriter companies as promotional tools. As of 2019, the average typing speed on a mobile phone was 36.2 wpm with 2.3% uncorrected errors—there were significant correlations with age, level of English proficiency, and number of fingers used to type.
Stenotype
Stenotype keyboards enable the trained user to input text as fast as 360 wpm at very high accuracy for an extended period, which is sufficient for real-time activities such as court reporting or closed captioning. While training dropout rates are very high—in some cases only 10% or even fewer graduate—stenotype students are usually able to reach speeds of 100–120 wpm within six months, which is faster than most alphanumeric typists. Guinness World Records gives 360 wpm with 97.23% accuracy as the highest achieved speed using a stenotype.
Numeric entry The numeric entry or 10-key speed is a measure of one's ability to manipulate the numeric keypad found on most modern separate computer keyboards. It is used to measure speed for jobs such as data entry of number information on items such as remittance advice, bills, or checks, as deposited to lock boxes. It is measured in keystrokes per hour (KPH). Many jobs require a certain KPH, often 8,000 or 10,000.
Handwriting For an adult population (age range 18–64) the average speed of copying is 68 letters per minute (approximately 13 wpm), with the range from a minimum of 26 to a maximum of 113 letters per minute (approximately 5 to 20 wpm). A study of police interview records showed that the highest speed fell in the range 120–155 characters per minute, the highest possible limit being 190 characters per minute. According to various studies the speed of handwriting of 3–7 graders varies from 25 to 94 letters per minute. Using stenography (shorthand) methods, this rate increases greatly. Handwriting speeds up to 350 words per minute have been achieved in shorthand competitions.
Reading and comprehension Words per minute is a common metric for assessing reading speed and is often used in the context of remedial skills evaluation, as well as in the context of speed reading, where it is a controversial measure of reading performance. A word in this context is the same as in the context of speech. Research done in 2012 measured the speed at which subjects read a text aloud, and found the typical range of speeds across 17 different languages to be 184±29 wpm or 863±234 characters per minute. However, the number of wpm varied between languages, even for languages that use the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets: as low as 161±18 for Finnish and as high as 228±30 for English. This was because different languages have different average word lengths (longer words in such languages as Finnish and shorter words in English). However, the number of characters per minute tends to be around 1000 for all the tested languages. For the tested Asian languages that use particular writing systems (Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese) these numbers are lower. Scientific studies have demonstrated that reading—defined here as capturing and decoding all the words on every page—faster than 900 wpm is not feasible given the limits set by the anatomy of the eye. While proofreading materials, people are able to read English at 200 wpm on paper, and 180 wpm on a monitor. [Those numbers from Ziefle, 1998, are for studies that used monitors prior to 1992. See Noyes & Garland 2008 for a modern tech view of equivalence.]
Speech and listening Audiobooks are recommended to be 150–160 words per minute, which is the range that people comfortably hear and vocalize words. Slide presentations tend to be closer to 100–125 wpm for a comfortable pace, auctioneers can speak at about 250 wpm, and the fastest speaking policy debaters speak from 350 to over 500 words per minute. Internet speech calculators show that various things influence words per minute including nervousness. An example of an agglutinative language, the average rate of Turkish speech is reported to be about 220 syllables per minute. When the time spent for the silent parts of speech are removed, the so-called average articulation rate reaches 310 syllables per minute. The average number of syllables per (written) word has been measured as 2.6. For a comparison, Flesch has suggested that the conversational English for consumers aims 1.5 syllables per word, although these measures are dependent on corpus. John Moschitta Jr. was listed in Guinness World Records, for a time, as the world's fastest speaker, being able to talk at 586 wpm. He has since been surpassed by Steve Woodmore, who achieved a rate of 637 wpm.
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