TIMED PRACTICE · Română
Romanian typing speed test
Flow like a stream. Space commits a word, backspace fixes the last one. Tab or Esc restarts.
Testing your Romanian typing speed
Romanian uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 5 characters beyond a-z — ă, ș, î, â, ț.
Romanian (Română) is a Latin-script language with a tail. Twenty-six keys carry most of it, and then 33% of the practice words here reach past them for one of the 5 characters outside a-z: ă, ș, î, â and ț. Where those live depends on the layout you have selected; the guide shows a Latin QWERTY family arrangement.
One number is worth carrying into the first session. About 73% of the letters in these Romanian words come from just ten characters. Get those ten genuinely automatic — not merely findable — and the rest of the layout stops being the thing standing between you and a readable sentence.
Pick a duration or a word count, turn punctuation and digits on if you want them, and type 43 common Romanian words in whatever order the shuffle produces. Because the words come fresh each run there is nothing to learn by repetition — a second attempt measures you, not your memory. Afterwards: net WPM, accuracy, a consistency figure and the keys you missed most.
The temptation in Romanian is to skip the accents while drilling and add them later. It does not work — the accent is part of the motion, and a hand that has practised the word without it has practised a different word. Drill them from the start, awkward as the first week is.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 43
- Distinct characters
- 23
- Average word
- 3.7 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Romanian practice words
- ă7
- ș4
- î3
- â2
- ț1
Counted across the 43 practice words. 33% of them need at least one.
mâinile calme găsesc rândul de bază fără efortComma below, not cedilla — a distinction that took Unicode years
Romanian uses ă, â, î, ș and ț. The last two are the interesting ones: the mark beneath s and t is properly a comma, not a cedilla, and for years the only widely available characters were the cedilla forms ş and ţ borrowed from Turkish.
Unicode added the correct comma-below characters in 1999 and font support lagged for a decade, so a great deal of older Romanian text uses the Turkish letters. Both still circulate, and searching Romanian text often means searching for both.
Romanian is the only Romance language in the region — surrounded by Slavic and Hungarian speakers — and it was written in Cyrillic until the nineteenth century.
Questions about typing in Romanian
Do I need a Romanian keyboard?
No. The characters beyond a-z in these practice words — ă, ș, î, â and ț — are reachable on the keyboard you already own once the right layout is selected in your operating system's settings. Some layouts give them their own keys, others build them from a modifier; either way the hardware is unchanged.
Which Romanian keyboard layout do these tests use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 5 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 43 practice words between them use 23 of those 31, so 8 characters never come up in the practice text — these are the commonest words rather than an even sweep of the layout. The keyboard guide below the typing area shows the keys you actually press, which for an input method are the Latin ones already printed on them.
How long should a Romanian typing test be?
Longer than you would like. A 15-second test measures your sprint and flatters you; over two minutes your sustainable speed shows up, along with the fact that concentration runs out. If you want one number that describes you rather than your best moment, take the longer one.
Why does my score change so much between attempts?
Partly the draw and partly you. No two runs of the Romanian typing test use the same words — they are sampled fresh from the bank each time, so one attempt can hand you a friendlier set than the next — and concentration varies more than most people credit. Take three and look at the middle one rather than the best.
How is typing speed measured here?
In words per minute, where a "word" is a fixed five characters rather than an actual word. That convention is what makes a WPM figure comparable between languages whose real words are very different lengths. The number reported is net WPM: uncorrected mistakes are subtracted, so it reflects text you actually produced correctly.
What will I actually be typing in Romanian?
43 of the most common words in Romanian, drawn at random. They use 23 distinct characters between them and average 3.7 written units each, with the longest running to about 9. Short, frequent words are used on purpose: they are the ones your hands will meet most often outside a lesson, so the practice transfers.
Is Romanian hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 33% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 5 such characters appear in total, and the rest is a keyboard you already know. The difficulty is concentrated in a handful of positions rather than spread across the layout.
Do I need an account, and is it free?
No, and it is free either way. Every lesson, drill, test and game works signed out, with your progress kept in this browser. An account adds three things only: your progress and settings follow you to another device, your streak survives clearing your browser data, and you can appear on the leaderboards under a name you choose.
Also in Romanian: lessons and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- How long a typing test should beFifteen seconds, one minute and five minutes measure three different things. Which length to use, and why comparing results across them is meaningless.
- Keyboard shortcuts worth learningThe text-editing shortcuts almost nobody learns are the ones that pay. What they are on each platform, how to learn them, and why they belong to typing.
- The home rowASDF and JKL; are where every touch typist's hands return. What the home row is, why the bumps are there, and how to drill it properly.