Calculating typing speed

Hey coders. I need to know how typing speed is calculated, for an app I'm doing. What is the average size of a "word"?

Hey coders. I need to know how typing speed is calculated, for an app I'm doing. What is the average size of a "word"?
I remember being assessed, back in high school, at the number of characters divided by ten. That was a long time ago.

I don't think there is a standard average size of a word. In normal writing there are going to be more short words just by the nature of our language.

is, a, the, be, to, ...

I think the best route would be to calculate the number of words and then divide by the total number of characters. I know it's not an average, but the test would be more accurate.

My typing speed is approximately 72 WPM... I got this result by taking the number of characters over the minute and dividing by 5. So, I use 5 as the word size. With 10 as the word size, I'd go down to 36 WPM.

Yeah, I think Iceplugs right. I'm pretty sure a standard word length is around 5.

I'll 3rd that - way back when I used to do data entry as a side job the WPM rating was based on 5-character word (they just divided the number of characters by 5 to get WPM) and the other measurement was Keystrokes/Hour (most important for numerical entry). Also, the WPM rating was de-rated based on errors.

While here may not be a standard word size, I bet there are standards as far as quantifying typing speed in the job market.

We used bigger words back when I was in high school. :cool:

Everywhere I have ever worked, WPM has always been calculated, as IcePlug said, as characters/5. Even though 5 may or may not be an average word size (as this may differ greatly depending on the sort of document), it is a convenient standard.

*John is ashamed that he never learned to type

I'm not sure if it would work well but I would say that you calculate the number of character and you divide it by the number of space so you will have the average lenght for a word in this text. Then you divide the time the user took to write is text by this average.