Do Spanish speakers type slower than English speakers?

Not for mechanical reasons worth worrying about. On our corpora Spanish needs about 2.1% more keystrokes than English for the same characters, which is around one word per minute at typical speeds. A larger personal gap is usually familiarity with the language.

Why is French cheaper to type than Spanish, despite more accents?

Because of the layout rather than the language. AZERTY puts the four commonest French accents in direct access on the number row, one keystroke each, while Spanish sends its five accented vowels through a dead key at two keystrokes each.

Are French words really longer than English words?

Our corpora say 4.57 characters against 4.54, which is not a difference. Published corpus studies disagree with each other about the direction, so we no longer make the claim in either direction.

Should I compare my speed in words or in keystrokes?

Keystrokes, if you are comparing across languages, because they count what your fingers did rather than a five-character convention. Words per minute is better for comparing yourself against published research, which almost always uses it.

Does your language slow your typing down? We measured our own corpora

2026-09-04 · 6 min read

Every typing site repeats the same explanation for why a Spanish or French score comes out below an English one: the words are longer. We had four corpora sitting in the repository and no excuse not to check. Word length turns out to be nearly identical across all four. The real cost is the accent, and it varies by keyboard layout in a way that puts French - the language people expect to be worst - almost level with English.

What we measured, and on what

Four sentence corpora that this site serves to its own visitors: 86,973 characters of English, 51,972 of Spanish, 51,149 of French and 47,760 of Portuguese. That is what someone typing here actually types, which makes it the right thing to measure for a claim about what they will see on their results page.

For each language we counted characters, words, and the keystrokes needed to produce them. A character typed directly costs one keystroke. A character produced through a dead key - press the accent, nothing appears, then press the vowel - costs two. That distinction is the whole story.

The words are not longer

Average word length came out at 4.54 characters in English, 4.56 in Spanish, 4.57 in French and 4.54 in Portuguese. A spread of three hundredths of a character across four languages is not an explanation for anything.

We went looking for published corpus studies to check whether our corpora were unrepresentative, and found that the studies disagree with each other. One set of figures puts English at 4.5, French at 4.84 and Spanish at 4.96. Another puts English at 4.87, French at 4.81 and Portuguese at 4.35, which reverses the ordering and makes Portuguese the shortest of the three. A third, drawn from a voice corpus, puts French at 5.4 against Spanish at 5.0.

When three studies disagree about the direction of an effect and the differences sit inside a single character, the honest position is that word length does not explain a typing-speed gap. We had this claim on sixteen pages. It has been removed from all of them.

The accents are the cost, and the layout decides how much

Here is the measurement that does hold up, expressed as extra keystrokes needed per hundred characters of text:

English: 100.00 keystrokes per 100 characters, by definition.

French: 100.27. Spanish: 102.11. Portuguese: 101.61.

French is almost free, and that is the result worth sitting with, because it is the opposite of what everyone expects. French looks like the most accented of the three and by volume it is: 17.4 accented characters per hundred words, against 12.6 for Spanish and 10.6 for Portuguese. But AZERTY puts e-acute, e-grave, c-cedilla and a-grave in direct access on the number row, one keystroke each. Only the circumflex and diaeresis go through a dead key, and they account for 1.5 characters per hundred words out of that 17.4.

Spanish pays the most while using fewer accents, because its layout made the opposite trade. The n-tilde has its own key on the home row and costs nothing. The five accented vowels do not, and they are common: 11.7 dead-key characters per hundred words.

Portuguese sits between them for the same structural reason. ABNT2 gives the cedilla its own key, right of the L where a US keyboard puts a semicolon, so it is free; the acute, circumflex, tilde and grave are not, at 8.9 dead-key characters per hundred words.

What that means for your score

Take a fixed finger speed of 300 keystrokes a minute, which is 60 words per minute in English. The same hands produce 59.8 words per minute in French, 59.0 in Portuguese and 58.8 in Spanish.

That is a gap of about one word per minute at the wide end. It is not the five to fifteen per cent that gets quoted, including on three pages of this site until we measured it.

So if your Spanish score is fifteen per cent below your English one, the keyboard is not the reason. Reading a language less fluently slows typing for reasons that have nothing to do with where the keys are, and that effect is far larger than anything the layout does. Which is worth knowing, because it is trainable and the layout is not.

Why keystrokes are the fairer unit

This is the practical conclusion. A words-per-minute figure divides characters by five and therefore inherits every quirk of what the language spells. A keystrokes-per-minute figure counts what your fingers did.

It is not an accident that the countries running formal typing exams in these languages score in keystrokes. Spain's oposiciones set a threshold in pulsaciones netas, Brazil's concursos count divergent characters against a fixed passage, and Indian commissions quote key depressions per hour alongside words per minute. All of them are measuring the work rather than the convention.

Typetera shows both after every test, for the same reason.

What we changed after measuring

Sixteen pages carried the longer-words claim in four languages. Every one has been rewritten to state the measured cost instead, and to name it as coming from these corpora rather than from linguistics in general.

Three language landing pages claimed a 5-15% gap. They now give the measured figure, note that a wider personal gap is usually familiarity rather than mechanics, and say so plainly.

The measurement is reproducible from the repository: the corpora are in content/passages, and the only judgement in it is which characters count as dead-key on which layout, which comes from the CLDR keyboard data this site already uses to teach those layouts.

Common questions

Do Spanish speakers type slower than English speakers?: Not for mechanical reasons worth worrying about. On our corpora Spanish needs about 2.1% more keystrokes than English for the same characters, which is around one word per minute at typical speeds. A larger personal gap is usually familiarity with the language.
Why is French cheaper to type than Spanish, despite more accents?: Because of the layout rather than the language. AZERTY puts the four commonest French accents in direct access on the number row, one keystroke each, while Spanish sends its five accented vowels through a dead key at two keystrokes each.
Are French words really longer than English words?: Our corpora say 4.57 characters against 4.54, which is not a difference. Published corpus studies disagree with each other about the direction, so we no longer make the claim in either direction.
Should I compare my speed in words or in keystrokes?: Keystrokes, if you are comparing across languages, because they count what your fingers did rather than a five-character convention. Words per minute is better for comparing yourself against published research, which almost always uses it.