Type Rush

How to raise your words-per-minute in Type Rush

Type Rush measures how many words you can type accurately in thirty seconds, and it reports both your words-per-minute and your accuracy at the end. Those two numbers pull against each other. Racing faster invites typos, and every mistake you have to notice and fix costs more time than typing a touch slower would have. The fastest sustainable score comes from smooth, accurate typing, not an all-out sprint that leaves errors in its wake. Accuracy in the high nineties is the mark to hold before you chase speed at all.

The timer only starts on your first keystroke, so take a breath, read the first word, and begin when you are ready. From there, keep a steady flow and press Space the moment you finish each word. Consistency carries a good score across the full thirty seconds; bursts do not.

Typing tips

• Put accuracy first. A clean run at a comfortable pace usually beats a frantic, error-filled one.
• Keep your fingers on the home row and let each finger cover its own keys instead of hunting and pecking.
• Read one word ahead of the one you are typing so your fingers always know what is coming next.
• Build a smooth, even rhythm rather than bursts of speed followed by pauses to recover.
• Do not look down at the keyboard. Trusting your muscle memory is faster than glancing back and forth.
• Ignore the live counter while the clock runs. Watching your score mid-test is the easiest way to trip over a simple word.

Pacing a thirty-second sprint

Thirty seconds is short enough that one stumble shows in the final number, so pace it like a sprinter rather than a gambler. Start at about nine tenths of your top speed and hold it there. The word you are most likely to fumble is the one right after a word you almost fumbled, because your rhythm is still broken, so give yourself one clean beat to reset instead of rushing to claw back lost time. If a word does go wrong, correct it calmly once and move on; panic-fixing burns more of the clock than the typo did. Treat the Space bar as part of the rhythm too; a solid thumb stroke between words keeps the cadence honest. And run the test more than once. Your second and third runs are usually quicker than the first, once the nerves are gone and your hands are warm.

Where the numbers come from

The words-per-minute score comes from a long tradition of typing tests, where one word is standardized as five characters so that long and short words count fairly against each other. Average typists land around forty words per minute, good ones clear sixty, and the fastest push well past a hundred. The metric rewards steadiness. A typist who never has to stop and fix mistakes will out-score a faster but sloppier one over any real stretch of text, and that is the whole lesson of a thirty-second test: the path to a higher number is typing more evenly, not harder. Short tests also flatter you a little, since a sprint score runs higher than an hour-long one. That is fine. Test yourself the same way each time and the trend is what matters.

A duel in 1888 settled how we type

Touch typing had to prove itself in public. On July 25, 1888, Frank McGurrin, a court stenographer from Salt Lake City who had taught himself to type without looking, faced Louis Taub in Cincinnati with 500 dollars at stake. Taub watched his keys the whole time. McGurrin typed blind with all his fingers and won going away, and that contest is often credited with convincing America that touch typing was the future. The keyboard itself is even older: Christopher Latham Sholes settled the QWERTY layout in the 1870s, partly to stop the metal arms of early machines from jamming, and we have all been typing on his compromise ever since. The ceiling keeps rising regardless. Barbara Blackburn, listed by Guinness as the fastest typist in the world, held around 150 words per minute for long stretches and peaked at 212 using the Dvorak layout. Every tip above is a small step down the road she took: eyes on the text, hands that know the way.