Picking a word list

The /wordlists/ page lists every pool the practice surface can pull from. There are more than twenty. Most users stick with English-1k. They should not.

English by frequency

The numbered English lists are ranked by how often the words appear in a trillion-word web corpus.

English-1k -- the 1,000 most common words. Roughly the words a six-year-old uses. Easy. Fast. Good for warm-ups and benchmarks.

English-5k -- 5,000 words. Adds journalism-level vocabulary: infrastructure, municipality, coalition. Most adult writing falls in this range.

English-10k -- 10,000 words. Newspaper level. Adds names of countries, common scientific terms, and the kind of word a careful reader knows but does not use daily.

English-20k -- 20,000 words. Magazine level. Now you are typing words like palatable, acrimonious, incommunicado. If you are a fast typist who finds 1k boring, this is the next step.

English-50k -- 50,000 words. Encyclopedic. Includes regional terms, technical jargon, archaic forms. A long session here will surface words you may not have seen before. The challenge is not your fingers; it is your spelling.

English advanced vocabulary -- a curated list, not frequency-ranked. SAT/GRE-level words: abnegation, perspicacious, sycophant, zephyr. Stretches your fingers and your vocabulary at the same time.

The progression is real. If you have only ever typed 1k, switching to 10k will drop your wpm by 5-10. That gap is your finger-vs-spelling bottleneck. Practice closes it within a few weeks.

Code lists

Code: JavaScript, Python, HTML, CSS, TypeScript, Rust, SQL, Bash -- each pulls real syntax tokens from that language. Symbols, brackets, and indentation are baked in.

If you write code, run code lists. The wpm number on a code list is not comparable to a prose wpm number; they are different skills with different ceilings.

Themed lists

Pangrams -- sentences that include every letter at least once ("the quick brown fox..."). Useful as a warm-up; one pangram exercises every key.

Misspellings -- the words people most often spell wrong. accommodate, definitely, embarrass, liaison. Useful if you find yourself slowing down on certain words because you are not sure of the spelling.

Latin phrases -- common Latin phrases used in English: ad hoc, bona fide, et cetera, prima facie. Niche, but enjoyable.

Countries and Capitals -- exactly what they sound like. Practice typing Liechtenstein and Ouagadougou without panicking.

Drill-style lists

Punctuation -- pulls only words that are punctuation marks or contain them heavily.

Numbers -- digit-only sequences in various shapes.

Scrabble -- short, high-value Scrabble words. The list contains many words with rare letters (q, x, z, j).

Auto-generated lists

Missed words -- the words you have mistyped most often, weighted by recency. This list updates after every session. The stats page has a Practice these button that loads it.

This is the most personalized list on the site. Five minutes here a few times a week is the fastest way to lower your error rate.

Picking one

For most sessions: English-1k to warm up, then English-10k for the bulk of practice.

If you write code: alternate prose and code lists.

If your accuracy is below 96%: spend a week on Missed words.

If your speed has plateaued on 10k: try 20k for two weeks.

If you want flavor: rotate the themed lists weekly.

The wordlist toggle is in Settings and on the practice toolbar. Switching takes one click.