Ask a search engine for typing games and you get a wall of ad-stuffed test sites, so here is the short version: we host two, both free, both running in the browser tab with nothing to install, and they train different things. Typing Race measures you. It is a proper words-per-minute test with real sentences, dressed up as a race against three cars that never speed up or slow down. Type Invaders drills you. It is an arcade shooter where every alien is a letter or a word and your keyboard is the gun, and it walks the whole keyboard one key at a time, from the home row to brackets and symbols. Play one to find out where you stand and the other to move the number, and in between, read the bit about what a good speed actually is, because most people's idea of it is wrong.
What counts as a good typing speed?
A word, for the purpose of a typing test, is five characters including spaces. That convention is what lets a passage full of short words and a passage full of long ones give comparable results, and it is the one both our games use. On that scale most adults who type regularly land somewhere in the forties. A 2018 study of 168,000 people who took an online typing test found an average of about 52 words per minute, and professional transcription work sits in the sixties and seventies. So 40 is ordinary, 60 is quick, 80 is fast, and anything past 100 is a party trick. The number that matters more is accuracy. A typist at 50 words per minute with 98 percent accuracy is producing usable text faster than one at 65 with 90 percent, because every error costs the keystroke, the backspace and the retype, and the fastest way to raise a speed score is almost always to stop making mistakes rather than to move your hands faster.
Typing Race: the honest test
Pick easy, normal or hard and start typing the passage on screen. The clock starts on your first keystroke, not when the page loads, so there is no penalty for reading the sentence first. Each character turns green when it is right and red when it is wrong, with a cursor marking your place, and your car moves along its lane as you go. The passages are proper sentences rather than random word lists, because typing real English is what a words-per-minute figure is supposed to measure; hard mode is where the punctuation, capitals, digits, brackets and a line of code live, and it is where most people's rhythm falls apart.
The three rivals are the useful part. Rookie drives at a steady 28 words per minute, Regular at 45 and Ace at 68, and none of them reacts to you; each is a benchmark wearing a car costume. Watching Regular's bumper creep past yours three words from the end tells you something a number at the finish line cannot, and it tells you while you can still do something about it. At the flag you get your speed, your accuracy and your finishing position. The speed is correct characters divided by five, per minute. The accuracy counts every keystroke you made, including the ones you backspaced over, so a mistake you fixed still shows up. Your personal best is saved in your browser, Enter starts a fresh race and the refresh button gives you a new passage at the same difficulty.
Type Invaders: the drill that does not feel like one
Press Space and letters start drifting down toward your turret. Type one and it is destroyed; let one reach the ground and you lose one of three lives. Every level needs twelve hits to clear, and there are twenty-one of them, arranged the way a typing course is: the first is the home row alone, a s d f j k l, the second is two-letter combinations of the same keys, and then each level adds a pair of keys, G and H, T and Y, R and U, E and I, W and O, Q and P, and on until the whole alphabet is in play. After that come short, medium and long words, then numbers, punctuation, brackets and symbols, and an expert and a master mode that throw all of it at you at speed. That structure is the point. A typing test tells you your speed on the keys you already know; Type Invaders makes you use the ones you avoid, and it does it by turning the P key into an alien that will land on you if you hunt for it.
Space pauses, Backspace clears a mistyped character, N skips to the next level if you want to jump ahead, and on the title screen the arrow keys let you pick a starting level, so someone who already touch-types can begin at the words or the symbols. It is an open-source game by Robin Langer, hosted here under the MIT licence with its web font swapped for a bundled one so it runs without calling out anywhere, and there is a hidden text field so a phone's on-screen keyboard can drive it too.
How to actually get faster
Ten minutes a day beats an hour on Sunday, and the ten minutes should be split. Start with two or three Type Invaders levels on whichever keys you are weakest, which for most people is the top row and the numbers, and play them slowly enough to hit every alien first time. Then run one Typing Race on normal and one on hard, and watch the accuracy figure rather than the speed. When accuracy sits above 97 percent for a week, the speed will have moved on its own. Keep your fingers on the home row and use the finger that belongs to each key even when a different one would be quicker today; the whole gain from touch typing comes from never looking down, and looking down is a habit you break by refusing to do it while the score is low. Last, stop chasing Ace. Beat Rookie cleanly, then beat Regular cleanly, and Ace will turn up on its own around the time your accuracy stops dropping in hard mode.
On a school laptop or a Chromebook
Both games are ordinary web pages. There is no extension, no app and no account, so they run on a managed Chromebook the same as on a home PC, and Typing Race is the one game on this site that nobody has ever had to explain to a teacher. If you are looking for more in that vein, our list of games to play when bored in class and the longer unblocked games for school guide were both written with the same laptop in mind.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good typing speed?
Around 40 words per minute is typical for an adult who types regularly, 60 is quick and 80 or more is fast. Accuracy matters more than the raw number: 50 words per minute at 98 percent accuracy gets more done than 65 at 90 percent.
How is words per minute calculated?
A word is counted as five characters including spaces, so the speed is your correctly typed characters divided by five, divided by the minutes the passage took. Typing Race also counts every keystroke, including corrected ones, when it works out your accuracy.
Do these typing games work on a phone or a Chromebook?
Yes. Both run in the browser with nothing to install, so a Chromebook is fine. On a phone, tap the play area to bring up the on-screen keyboard; a real keyboard is better for practice, but both games accept whatever you type.
If typing practice is what you were after, the brain games that make you smarter list covers the other skills that transfer, and both games live among the casual games and arcade games.
Play Typing Race free to get your number, then Type Invaders to move it, both in your browser, no download and no sign-up. Fingers on the home row, eyes on the screen, and let Rookie lose first.