It was back in 2020 during quarantine that I got active on Discord, a social networking app to chat with friends and join communities you love. I was already really into typing and had recently discovered this new clean and minimalistic typing website called MonkeyType. I joined their discord server and made a lot of good friends.
Original work
I revisited the research I did back in 2020 and decided to update it. So in April of 2024, I redid the whole thing over again and this time with a huge sample size of 53455 total members in the monkeytype discord server.
People started to ask what would be the average typing speed in the server and that got me thinking. “Competitive” typing was already niche as is, so it would be rather pointless to research and find out what the average typing speed would be in a typing-dedicated discord server where results will skew towards the higher end. Nevertheless, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to take the task of finding the average typing speed of the entire server. Thankfully I was already studying for a statistics class so that would come in handy for the calculation.
This was what I came up with in the beginning. There were a lot less people on the server then so the sample size was incredibly small. Still, it can be observed that the biggest number of people typed in the range of 100-109WPM range at 208 people typing at that speed.
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Updated work
The server had grew by a lot in the last four years, as can be seen through the sheer raw numbers. Some really interesting takeaways from the graph. The fact that 100-109WPM still hosted the most number of users in the server, some extreme outliers who can type more than 200+WPM, one allegedly being able to type at 270+WPM is almost unbelievable to fathom.
<aside> 💡 FYI: The way Monkeytype assigns the WPM roles in the discord server is through the users’ personal best score on their Time 60s typing test on their website. The test is a minute long and consist of random words that have to be typed to get your final speed (WPM) so it’s more like raw speed since it’s not coherent sentences with punctuations and the likes.
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The average typing speed in the world is said to be roughly around 45wpm, which means on average a person can type 45 words per minute. Most people familiar with computers can go much higher at around 60-80WPM. Beyond that, it’s mostly enthusiast who have either practiced typing or are usually gamers (on average gamers do tend to type a lot faster).
All the calculations and data can be found in my Google Sheets document:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qVyd-EY0R4v24-_afLitZeSUgm4sauSEVKHLCcHStdI/edit?usp=sharing
0-59WPM
This is the range where the majority of the world falls in when it comes to typing. Here they [hunt and peck](https://www.typing.com/blog/hunt-and-peck/#:~:text=What is hunt and peck,keyboard to type a word.) to type the words. People in this range are usually new to computer typing or are just learning to type (like young children or old people).
In the monkeytype discord server, few people type at these speeds relatively to other speed ranges.
60-120WPM
At 60WPM, a person is typing one word per second. They’re usually not looking at the keyboard, and have already learned touch typing. On the higher end, 120WPM is already an unbelievable speed for most people. At 120WPM, a person is typing 2 words each second!
It can be observed in the server that a lot of the bulk lies in this range. Since it’s a typing (and keyboard) server, it’s quite expected that they type faster on average.
120-180WPM
This is where a person has to put a lot of effort to reach such high speeds. On the higher end at a whooping 180WPM, a person is typing 3 words per second! You’d think it’s quite impossible but 110 people do type in the range of 180-189WPM in the monkeytype discord server.
You can observe that after the 100-109WPM range the number of people that type more than 100WPM starts to fall off really quickly. It might be because 100WPM is a milestone for a lot of people to stop at (triple digit typing speed)).
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180WPM+
Very few people can type more than 180WPM even in a dedicated typing server. It simply takes a lot of time and effort that lots of people will find hard to allocate. Many might consider it impractical to learn to type at such high speeds but the 180WPM+ folks would disagree. Like many other competitive games, monkeytype also has a leaderboard for the fastest peeps so it serves as a motivation to get even faster for them.
After 180WPM, the number of people that can type in the range 190-199WPM falls from the triple digits to just 81. It doesn’t stop there, 19 people can type in the range of 220-229WPM, but only 5 can type in the range of 230-239WPM. Only a handful of people can type more than 230WPM, you can count on your fingers the number of people that exceed 230WPM.
This research was made possible thanks to the bot command called “in-role [tag]” available on the server. It gives a list of how many people are in a specific role, even the WPM roles which is how I got the data. MonkeyType actually has its graph in the website and even shows what top percentile you are but this was before it existed and I was really only interested to see the discrepancy between the average typing in the world vs in a competitive typing server.
<aside> <img src="/icons/keyboard_gray.svg" alt="/icons/keyboard_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Almost forgot to mention the point of the case study, the average typing speed in the server is 100.5WPM (as of April 2024)! Which is more than double the world average of 45WPM.
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