Secretary Typing Test
Real memos, minutes and business letters — with instant WPM and accuracy.
Type the documents an office actually runs on — meeting confirmations, memoranda, minutes, itineraries and board papers, with the names, dates and reference codes left in. Built for secretaries, administrative and executive assistants, and office managers.
What you will actually be typing
Taken straight from the test. The words are ordinary — that is the point. Look instead at how many things in these passages you would have to get exactly right, and could not guess.
Dear Mr. Thompson, thank you for your email regarding the upcoming meeting. I am pleased to confirm that the meeting will take place on Thursday at two in the afternoon in the main conference room. Please let me know if this time works for you. If you have any documents you would like to share in advance, kindly send them by Wednesday. I look forward to your reply. In the meantime, I will arrange for the room to be set up and will make sure that the projector and other equipment are ready for use. …
MEMORANDUM. TO: All Department Heads. FROM: Office of the Operations Manager. DATE: April 18, 2024. RE: Updated Procedures for Purchase Requests. Effective May 1, all purchase requests exceeding 500 dollars must be submitted through the new online approval system rather than by paper form. Requests should include a detailed description, the vendor name, and the relevant budget code. Approvals will be processed within two business days. Please ensure that all members of your team are familiar with the updated procedure before the effective date. The new system has been introduced in order to improve accuracy …
Minutes of the Quarterly Board Meeting convened on April 16, 2024, in the Executive Boardroom. The Chairperson called the meeting to order at ten in the morning and confirmed that a quorum was present. The minutes of the preceding meeting were reviewed and approved without amendment. The Chief Financial Officer presented the consolidated financial statements, highlighting a year-over-year increase in operating revenue of twelve percent alongside a corresponding rise in administrative expenditures, which the Board discussed at length. Following deliberation, the Board resolved unanimously to approve the proposed capital expenditure plan and directed management to …
Who this test is for
Secretaries, administrative assistants, executive assistants, office managers, receptionists and business support staff — and anyone facing an office typing assessment, which is still a common step in hiring for these roles. It is also the right starting point if you are moving into office work from another field and want to know where your speed actually stands.
| Durations | 1, 3, 5 or 10 minutes |
|---|---|
| Target speed | 45 WPM net (most office roles advertise higher — see below) |
| Scoring formula | 5-character standard word; one standard word deducted per incorrect word |
| Backspace | Allowed (configurable) |
| Difficulty levels | Easy (everyday correspondence) · Medium (memos, minutes, offers) · Hard (executive and board documents) |
| Passage corpus | 30 passages, 11,934 words, averaging 398 words per passage |
| Proper nouns | 33 per 1,000 words, plus 61 honorifics and 68 written dates |
| Cost | Free, no login, results never leave your browser |
The easiest text on this site to read, and the hardest to get exactly right
We ran this corpus against the others we publish, expecting business correspondence to sit somewhere in the middle. It does not. On every measure of lexical difficulty it is the least demanding of the professional tests — average word length 4.97 characters against 5.21 for legal and 5.21 for clinical prose.
Then we measured the things that are not vocabulary at all.
| Corpus | Avg word | Words 10+ chars | Proper nouns / 1,000 | Honorifics | Dates |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Secretary (this test) | 4.97 | 7.8% | 33 | 61 | 68 |
| Legal | 5.21 | 10.2% | 17 | 1 | 0 |
| Medical | 5.21 | 8.6% | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| General typing test | 5.66 | 12.8% | 1 | 0 | 0 |
That is the whole difficulty of secretarial typing in one table. Names, dates, honorifics and reference codes are the categories where a spell-checker cannot help you and context cannot either. When you type a long clinical term, redundancy protects you: even a hesitant typist usually gets pathophysiology right because the word only has one possible ending. A surname has no redundancy at all. Caldwell and Caldwel are equally plausible strings, and only the source document knows which is correct.
This also explains the apparent paradox in the speed expectations. Office roles commonly advertise higher WPM than clinical or legal ones, which looks unfair until you notice that nothing in the vocabulary is slowing you down. There is no difficult-words allowance in business correspondence. The bar is higher precisely because the text is easy.
The documents you will produce, and what goes wrong in each
Office work is format work. Each document type has a settled shape, and most errors are failures of structure rather than of typing — a missing apology in the minutes, a salutation that does not match its closing, an action item with no owner against it.
| Document | When it is used | Where errors cluster |
|---|---|---|
| Business letter | External correspondence with clients, suppliers, applicants | Recipient name and title, salutation matching the closing, address block |
| Memorandum | Internal announcements and policy changes | The TO / FROM / DATE / RE block — capitalised labels, consistent order |
| Minutes | Record of what a meeting decided | Attendance and apologies lists, action owners, dates against each item |
| Agenda | Circulated before a meeting | Running times, presenter names, item numbering that survives edits |
| Itinerary | Travel and visit scheduling | Flight numbers, booking references, arrival and departure times |
| Confirmation or offer letter | Bookings, appointments, employment offers | Dates, sums of money, deadlines for response |
The Medium and Hard passages in this test are drawn from all six categories, so practising here exposes you to each shape rather than to one repeated form of prose.
Three formatting habits that matter more than speed
Employers rarely test these, and they surface within the first week of the job. If you are coming into office work from elsewhere, these are worth more to you than another five WPM.
Styles instead of manual formatting
A heading made bold and enlarged by hand looks identical to a real heading until someone edits the document, at which point the formatting drifts and the table of contents stops working. Applying a named style takes the same keystroke and survives everything downstream.
Tabs and indents instead of repeated spaces
Alignment built from spaces holds together only at one font size on one machine. A memo block, a signature line, or a two-column list built with tab stops keeps its shape when the document is reformatted, printed, or opened by someone else.
Mail merge
The single largest time saving available in routine office work. A hundred personalised letters is either an afternoon or four minutes depending on whether you know this, and it also removes the most common source of embarrassing errors, which is a name left over from the previous copy.
Where this role sits now
An honest note on the job market, because the picture is more nuanced than either the optimistic or pessimistic version. The Bureau of Labor Statistics groups secretaries and administrative assistants together and projects the occupation to decline over the coming decade, as software lets managers manage their own calendars and correspondence [1].
What has happened inside most organisations, though, is not that the work disappeared but that it changed composition. Routine typing and dictation shrank; coordination, scheduling, document management, event logistics and systems administration grew. The roles that absorbed that work were frequently retitled — office manager, business support officer, executive assistant, operations coordinator, team administrator. If you are searching for work, search those titles too; a search for "secretary" alone will show you a shrinking slice of a larger market.
Typing speed still appears in these postings, usually in the 50 to 70 WPM range, and it is still tested. But it is now the entry condition rather than the job.
Do you still need shorthand?
For most office roles, no. Pitman and Gregg shorthand were core secretarial qualifications for most of the twentieth century, and the skill was genuinely valuable when the alternative was writing longhand at the speed of speech. Recording, laptops in meetings and automatic transcription have removed most of that need.
It has not vanished entirely. Shorthand speeds are still specified in some court and parliamentary reporting roles, in a small number of traditional executive assistant posts, and notably in several government recruitment notices in India and the UK where a stenographer grade carries an explicit shorthand requirement. If you are targeting one of those, the requirement will be stated in the notice — check it rather than assuming in either direction. For everything else, the transferable skill is minute taking: deciding in real time what is worth recording, which no technology has yet replaced.
A four-week plan for office typing
Roughly 20 minutes a day. Note that week two is about names rather than speed — that is where the errors that actually cost you a job offer come from.
| Week | Focus | What to run | Move on when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Raw speed on ordinary prose | Easy passages, 5-minute runs | 95% accuracy with no glances at the keyboard |
| Week 2 | Names and honorifics | Medium passages — read each name twice before typing it | Zero errors on any proper noun across a full run |
| Week 3 | Structured documents | Hard passages — memos, minutes, board papers | Capitalised field labels typed without breaking rhythm |
| Week 4 | Assessment conditions | Hard passages, 10-minute runs, backspace disabled once per session | 60+ WPM net at 97% accuracy for the full 10 minutes |
Dates, times and reference codes appear constantly in office documents, so add the numbers test and the alphanumeric test to weeks two and three. If your general speed is below about 35 WPM, work through the free touch-typing course first.
Before an office typing assessment: a self-check
- You clear 55 WPM or better on Hard passages, not just Easy ones.
- Accuracy holds above 97% across a full 10-minute run.
- No proper noun in a full passage costs you a correction.
- Dates, times and reference codes are as fast as ordinary words.
- Capitalised field labels — TO, FROM, DATE, RE — do not break your rhythm.
- You have run at least one session with backspace disabled and know your true first-pass accuracy.
- You know whether the assessment reports gross or net WPM, because the difference is large.
Frequently asked questions
What typing speed do employers expect from a secretary or administrative assistant?
Commonly advertised ranges run from 50 to 70 WPM, which is higher than most of the other professional roles on this site. That surprises people, but there is a logic to it: secretarial text is ordinary English, so nothing in the vocabulary slows you down. Where a medical typist can reasonably be slower because the words are genuinely difficult, an administrator is typing plain business prose and the expectation rises accordingly. No professional body publishes a required figure — these are employer conventions.
Why is secretarial typing harder than it looks?
Because the difficulty is not in the words, it is in the details. We measured our corpora: this one contains 33 proper nouns per thousand words against 1 in general typing prose, plus 61 honorifics and 68 written dates where the other professional corpora contain almost none. Names, dates and reference codes are exactly what a spell-checker cannot validate and context cannot help you infer. You can guess the end of a long clinical word; you cannot guess whether a client is Caldwell or Caldwel.
What kind of text is in this test?
Three graded levels of real office documents. Easy passages are everyday correspondence — meeting confirmations, reminders, notices, client emails. Medium passages are structured business documents including memoranda, minutes, offer letters and schedules. Hard passages are executive-register material: board minutes, policy memoranda, tender correspondence and formal notices. The corpus holds 30 passages and 11,934 words.
Do I still need shorthand?
In the overwhelming majority of roles, no. Pitman and Gregg shorthand were core secretarial skills for most of the twentieth century, and they persist in a few niches — some court and parliamentary reporting, a handful of traditional executive assistant posts, and certain government roles in India and the UK where a shorthand speed is still specified in the recruitment notice. For general office work it has been displaced by recording, laptops in meetings, and automated transcription. Check the specific job posting rather than assuming either way.
What is the difference between copy typing, audio typing and minute taking?
Copy typing means reproducing a document you can see, which is what this test measures. Audio typing means working from a recording, which adds listening, playback control and usually a foot pedal — closer to the medical transcription test. Minute taking is different from both: you are listening to a live discussion and simultaneously deciding what is worth recording, then writing it in a formal register afterwards. It is a judgement skill rather than a typing skill, and it is the one most often underestimated in interviews.
How should I handle names I have not seen before?
Slow down deliberately and type them as a separate deliberate act rather than in the flow of the sentence. Read the name, type it, read it back. This feels inefficient and is not — a name typed wrong in a letter to a client is a visible professional failure of a kind that a mistyped ordinary word never is. If a name is genuinely ambiguous in the source, check it rather than choosing the more likely spelling. The Medium and Hard passages here are deliberately full of unfamiliar surnames for exactly this reason.
Is the secretary role disappearing?
The job title is fading faster than the work is. The Bureau of Labor Statistics groups secretaries and administrative assistants together and projects a decline over the decade, driven by software that lets managers handle their own calendars and correspondence [1]. What has actually happened in most organisations is that routine typing shrank while coordination, scheduling and document management grew, and the roles that survived were retitled — office manager, business support, executive assistant, operations coordinator. Search those titles as well.
What formatting skills matter beyond typing speed?
Three, in roughly this order. First, styles and templates rather than manual formatting — a document formatted by hand falls apart the moment someone edits it. Second, tabs and indents rather than repeated spaces, which is what makes a memo block or a signature line hold its alignment. Third, mail merge, which turns an afternoon of individual letters into a few minutes. Employers rarely test these directly, but they show up immediately in the first week of the job.
Should I practise with backspace turned off?
Once a week, yes. Leave it on for normal practice, since real document work involves correcting as you go. But a session with backspace disabled tells you your true first-pass accuracy, which is the number that matters if an assessment does not allow corrections. Most people find the gap between their two figures is larger than they expected, and closing it is what actually raises a score under test conditions.
How do I prepare for an office typing assessment specifically?
Practise on the Hard passages rather than the Easy ones, because assessments tend to use formal business documents rather than casual email. Work at the duration the assessment uses — a 10-minute test is a different skill from a 1-minute one. Make sure numbers are as fast as letters, since dates, times and reference codes appear constantly. And confirm what the assessment measures: some report gross WPM, some net, and the difference on a 60 WPM run with a few errors is substantial.
Can I use backspace during this test?
Yes, backspace is enabled by default and can be switched off in the settings above the typing area. The default matches real office work, where you correct errors as you notice them.
Is this secretary typing test free?
Yes. No login, no signup, no limit on attempts. Scoring runs in your browser and your results are never uploaded to our servers.
Sources
Word density, proper-noun, honorific and date figures are computed from our own corpora and can be regenerated with scripts/corpus-stats.mjs. Proper nouns are counted with a heuristic — a capitalised word that does not follow sentence-ending punctuation — which is approximate but applied identically to every corpus, so the comparison between them is sound. Typing speed ranges are drawn from commonly advertised roles and are labelled as such; no professional body publishes a required figure for this occupation.
- Occupational Outlook Handbook: Secretaries and Administrative AssistantsU.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · link checked 21 Aug 2026
- Occupational Outlook Handbook: Office and Administrative Support OccupationsU.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · link checked 21 Aug 2026