The shortest test we offer
Fifteen seconds is barely a dozen words for most people. There is no time to settle, no time to tire and no time to recover from a fumble. What you get is a reading of peak speed: the fastest your hands move when everything goes right.
The clock starts when you press the first key and the result arrives a quarter of a minute later.
What peak speed is good for
Your burst figure is not the speed you would hold through a page of writing. It is still worth knowing, for two reasons.
First, it shows your headroom. If your fifteen-second speed is far above your one-minute speed, your fingers already know how to move quickly. What is missing is rhythm and accuracy over time, and those respond well to practice.
Second, it is a quick way to test a change. Adjusted your chair, switched keyboards, or finished a drill on awkward letters? A few fifteen-second runs will tell you within a minute whether it helped.
Expect big swings
With so few words, each one carries weight. One mistyped word can cost a large slice of the result, and a string of short, friendly words can inflate it. Take three or four runs and look at the middle of the range instead of the best.
The same caution applies to accuracy. Every keystroke counts toward it, including ones you corrected, so a single messy word moves the figure a long way on a run this short. A run that lasts under five seconds of actual typing, or has no correct characters, is too short to score and nothing is saved.
Step up when you are ready
Once the sprint feels easy, lengthen it. The 30-second typing test keeps most of the urgency and adds enough time for a stumble to even out. It also counts toward your daily streak, which this test does not.
If you are using the sprint to loosen up before a longer session, the typing warm-up page offers full sentences at a gentler pace.
Tips for a clean burst
Read the first three words before you touch a key. The timer waits for you, so there is no cost to looking ahead. Keep your hands relaxed; tension makes neighbouring keys easier to hit by accident. And resist the urge to race the countdown ring. Watch the text, not the clock.
Your fifteen-second best is saved separately from every other preset, in this browser, with no account needed.