TIMED PRACTICE · Yorùbá
Yoruba typing speed test
Flow like a stream. Space commits a word, backspace fixes the last one. Tab or Esc restarts.
Testing your Yoruba typing speed
Yoruba is written in the Latin alphabet. Every practice word here stays inside it: 26 letter keys and nothing beyond them.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 79 common Yoruba words — 20 distinct characters in all, averaging 3.6 written units per word. A test can run for a fixed duration or a fixed number of words, with punctuation and numbers optional. Words are drawn at random each time, so no two runs are the same and there is nothing to memorise. The result reports net speed, accuracy, how steady you were across the run, and the five keys you got wrong most often.
Yoruba (Yorùbá) makes no demands of your hardware at all. No layout to install, no dead keys, no modifier chords — 79 common words spelled entirely from the letter keys. If you have never touch typed before, this is the sensible place to start, and the sensible thing to start with is accuracy.
The plateau in Yoruba is almost always the same thing: looking down. It feels faster and it caps you, because a glance is a pause plus a re-find. Nothing here can stop you doing it — but a drill you did not type cleanly will not be counted, which helps.
Worth knowing before you start: these 79 words use 20 distinct characters, and the effort is not spread evenly across them. Ten of them do roughly 81% of the work, so the first week of practice buys far more than the tenth will. That is the normal shape of it, not a sign of a plateau.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 79
- Distinct characters
- 20
- Average word
- 3.6 units
Characters you will press most in these Yoruba words
- o45
- a35
- i31
- e29
- r23
- n21
- b15
- u15
- k11
- l8
- s8
- g7
Counted across the 79 practice words — the characters worth getting right first.
ati ni si ti fun pe ko wa pupo dara nla kekereUnderdots and tone marks, stacked
Yoruba is a tonal language with three tones, marked with acute and grave accents over vowels, or left unmarked for the mid tone. Separately, three letters carry a dot below — ẹ, ọ and ṣ — which distinguishes them from e, o and s as different sounds.
The two systems combine, so a single letter can carry a dot underneath and an accent above at the same time. That is a genuine difficulty for typing: the combination has to be built from a base letter and two combining marks, and many keyboards and fonts handle it poorly.
A great deal of Yoruba online is written without either, which is readable in context and ambiguous out of it — the same letters with different tones are frequently different words.
That includes the practice words on this page, and it is worth saying so rather than leaving you to notice. They are written in the plain form, which is the common informal register and is not correct orthography. Writing them properly needs a Yoruba speaker to check every tone, and guessing at tones in a tool whose purpose is that people practise typing them would be worse than admitting the gap.
Questions about typing in Yoruba
Do I need a Yoruba keyboard?
No. This is one of the few languages where the answer is genuinely "nothing to set up": the 20 distinct characters in the practice bank are all letters already printed on your keys.
What is the difference between raw and net WPM?
Raw counts everything you typed; net subtracts what you got wrong and left wrong. A large gap between the two is the most useful signal on the results screen — it means the speed is there and the accuracy is not, which is a different problem from simply being slow, and a faster one to fix.
Does accuracy matter more than speed?
For a score, they are the same measurement — net WPM already penalises errors. For improving, accuracy matters more, because the fastest route to a higher number is almost always removing mistakes rather than moving your fingers faster.
How long should a Yoruba 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.
Which Yoruba keyboard layout do these tests use?
Latin QWERTY family. The 79 practice words between them use 20 of those 26, 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 Yoruba?
79 of the most common words in Yoruba, drawn at random. They use 20 distinct characters between them and average 3.6 written units each, with the longest running to about 11. 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 Yoruba hard to type?
No — Yoruba is about as gentle an introduction to touch typing as exists. No accents, no layout change, a fairly compact inventory of 20 characters across the practice bank, and every key already under your fingers. Whatever difficulty you meet is the difficulty of touch typing itself, not of this language.
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 Yoruba: lessons and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Zulu, Afrikaans, Albanian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Catalan. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- 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.
- The bottom rowZ X C V B N M sit below home and are the least practised keys on the board. Which finger takes which, and why C and B cause trouble.