Typing Race
Everybody gets the same passage, from a book old enough to belong to everyone, and types it one word at a time. The first to the end wins; words per minute and accuracy go on the table. Two to four players, or you against the bot.
The race
- Each player presses Ready. When the last one has, a three-second countdown runs and the passage opens.
- Type the passage one word at a time and press space after each word. A word counts when it is exactly as printed, capital letters and punctuation included.
- A wrong word is a miss: it is counted against your accuracy, the word stays where it is, and you type it again. Misses cost time, never the race.
- You cannot skip a word or paste the passage. The passage is forty to seventy words, from a book published before 1930.
- The first player to type the last word wins. Everybody else keeps going: your place, your time and your pace go on the table when you finish.
The clock
- Every time is the server's. Your words are timed when they arrive, not when you press space, so a slow connection costs a little on every word and the page says so rather than pretending otherwise.
- Words per minute is counted the old way: the characters in the passage, spaces included, divided by five, over the minutes from the end of the countdown to your last word.
- Once somebody has finished, everybody else has thirty seconds to finish. A player who does not is placed after the finishers by the words they typed.
- A race nobody finishes ends on its own: the passage at fifteen words per minute, never less than a minute.
- A finishing pace over 250 words per minute is disqualified. No person types that fast for a whole passage, and a disqualified seat takes no place and no rating change; the others' results stand.
How a game ends
- Every seat has finished, been placed for not finishing, or been disqualified.
- A tie to the millisecond shares the place.
- A resignation puts that player out at once with the words they had typed; the others race on. A player who never presses Ready forfeits at the move deadline, which is a minute; once the race is live the race's own clock decides and the deadline only ends a race everybody has left.
Worth knowing before you start
- Accuracy beats speed. A miss costs the word again plus the time to notice; a steady 50 words per minute with no misses beats a hurried 70 with six.
- The bot is a typist with a speed and a habit of typos, drawn per game from 25 to 100 words per minute. Its misses are real: it types the wrong word, then the right one.
- On a phone, the page turns the keyboard's autocorrect and capitalisation off. If your keyboard corrects a word anyway, it counts as a miss; type it again as printed.
The seed chooses the passage and is published when the race ends, so the log can be checked. Nothing else is chance: every time is the server's clock, and the log records when each word arrived.
Typing Race terms
- A miss
- A word sent that is not the next word of the passage. Counted against accuracy; the word is still owed.
- Words per minute
- Characters typed, spaces included, divided by five, per minute of racing. The convention every typing test has used since the 1920s.
- The ceiling
- 250 words per minute. A finish faster than that is disqualified rather than believed.