TIMED PRACTICE · Cymraeg
Welsh typing speed test
Flow like a stream. Space commits a word, backspace fixes the last one. Tab or Esc restarts.
Testing your Welsh typing speed
Welsh uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 1 character beyond a-z — ŵ.
Speed in Welsh comes from prediction more than from finger speed: a familiar word is one motion, an unfamiliar one is a letter at a time. That is why drilling common words works — you are not training keys so much as the shapes the language keeps repeating.
Welsh (Cymraeg) is a Latin-script language with a tail. Twenty-six keys carry most of it, and then 1% of the practice words here reach past them for the one character outside a-z: ŵ. Where those live depends on the layout you have selected; the guide shows a Latin QWERTY family arrangement.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 92 common Welsh words — 21 distinct characters in all, averaging 4.4 written units per word. Nothing about the test is fixed except the fairness of it: the same bank, sampled fresh, so a result today is comparable with a result next month. Duration, word count, punctuation and digits are all yours to set.
The distribution is lopsided, which is the useful part. Across the 92 practice words, 21 distinct characters appear — and the single most common accounts for about 11% of every letter typed, with the top ten covering roughly 71%. Drilling the frequent ones first is where almost all of the benefit is.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 92
- Distinct characters
- 21
- Average word
- 4.4 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Welsh practice words
- ŵ1
Counted across the 92 practice words. 1% of them need at least one.
a y yn i o ar ac yr am at gyda ondDigraphs that count as single letters
Welsh treats eight digraphs — ch, dd, ff, ng, ll, ph, rh, th — as single letters of the alphabet. They are alphabetised as units, so in a Welsh dictionary "llan" comes after "lwc", and a crossword puzzle puts ll in one square.
This has no effect on what you press: each is typed as two keys. It does affect how Welsh words look to an English eye, and it explains why Welsh place names appear to contain improbable letter runs that are in fact ordinary sequences of letters.
Welsh also uses the circumflex — â, ê, î, ô, û, ŵ, ŷ — to mark long vowels, including on w and y, which are vowels in Welsh. Those two are the reason a UK keyboard alone is not quite enough.
Questions about typing in Welsh
Why does my score change so much between attempts?
Partly the draw and partly you. No two runs of the Welsh 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.
Why is my Welsh speed lower than my English speed?
Because you are doing two things at once: finding the key and recalling what it writes. Speed in a script you have typed for years is one motion; speed in a new one is a lookup followed by a motion. The lookup is what disappears with practice, and when it does the gap closes faster than most people expect.
Do I need a Welsh keyboard?
No, though you do need the right layout selected. 1 character in the practice words here sits outside a-z, and it comes up in 1% of those words — often enough that copying it from a character map will hold you back, and rare enough that people try to.
Which Welsh keyboard layout do these tests use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 1 character beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 92 practice words between them use 21 of those 27, so 6 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.
What will I actually be typing in Welsh?
92 of the most common words in Welsh, drawn at random. They use 21 distinct characters between them and average 4.4 written units each, with the longest running to about 10. 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 Welsh hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 1% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, one such character appears 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 account, no payment, no trial. Progress is stored in this browser, which is enough until you want it on a second device or on a leaderboard — that is the only thing an account buys, and it is optional.
Also in Welsh: lessons and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Yoruba, Zulu, Afrikaans, Albanian, Azerbaijani, Basque. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Adding a keyboard layoutThe step before any of this works: turning on the layout in your operating system, switching to it, and what to do about the wrong letters on your keycaps.
- Which finger types which keyThe standard finger assignment for every key on a QWERTY keyboard, why the index fingers carry two columns each, and the keys people get wrong.
- The top rowQ through P sit one row up from home, and every key there is a reach and a return. Which fingers do what, and why E and R feel different.