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FRENCH

French typing test - free, with accents and AZERTY support

Take a free French typing test online - with full native accents (é, è, à, ç, ê, î, ô, ù, û, ï, ë, ÿ) and support for both AZERTY and QWERTY layouts. The corpus is real French prose, not machine-translated English. Get WPM, CPM, accuracy, and per-key breakdown after every test.

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Français

LANGUAGE

Latin (with diacritics)

SCRIPT

None

LOGIN

Free

COST

Community review pending · Français

French typing test that respects the accents

A real French typing test has to handle the full French character set - the acute accent (é), grave accent (à, è, ù), circumflex (â, ê, î, ô, û), cedilla (ç), diaeresis (ë, ï, ü, ÿ), and the special œ and æ ligatures. Many English-first typing test sites either omit these characters or substitute their unaccented forms - which isn't real French. Typetera handles the full character set throughout the corpus. Your keyboard layout (AZERTY in France, QWERTY in Canada, BÉPO for typing enthusiasts) doesn't affect anything - we measure what your keyboard outputs.

AZERTY vs QWERTY for French typing

Native French typists in France typically use AZERTY layout, where the accented characters have dedicated keys (é on the 2 key, è on 7, à on 0, ç on 9, etc.). Canadian French typists often use QWERTY with software-mapped dead-keys for accents - same characters, different finger paths. BÉPO is a modern ergonomic layout designed for French frequency analysis but used only by enthusiasts. Typetera works with any of them. If you're learning French typing for the first time, AZERTY is the practical default for typing in France; QWERTY-Canadian is the right choice for Quebec and other Canadian French contexts.

Why French typing speeds vary

French is the cheapest of the Romance languages to type, which surprises people who expect the opposite. Measured on this site's own corpora, French needs about 0.3% more keystrokes than English for the same number of characters. The reason is the layout: AZERTY puts e-acute, e-grave, c-cedilla and a-grave in direct access on the number row, so the four commonest accents cost one keystroke each. Only the circumflex and diaeresis go through a dead key, and they are rare by comparison - about 1.5 per hundred words against 15.9 for the direct-access four. Word length is not the reason. In our corpora French words average 4.57 characters and English 4.54, and published corpus studies disagree with each other about which language is longer, so we no longer state it. At a fixed 300 keystrokes a minute, French shows about 59.8 words per minute against English's 60. A larger gap than that is usually familiarity rather than mechanics: typing in a language you read less fluently is slower for reasons that have nothing to do with the keyboard. Frappes par minute remain the fairer cross-language measure, because they count what your fingers did rather than a five-character convention.

Typing in French public competitions

Typing exercises in French public competitions are less common than most preparation material suggests. The épreuve pratique de bureautique set for adjoint administratif lasts 15 minutes and tests word processing, a spreadsheet and general office software; the framing documents we read describe what the candidate must produce, not how fast they must type, and name no speed criterion at all. That does not make typing irrelevant. A 15-minute exercise on a document you have to produce under time is won or lost partly at the keyboard, and accented characters on AZERTY are where French candidates lose the most time. It does mean that practising to a words-per-minute target for this exercise is practising against a number the exercise does not set. Where speed thresholds do appear is in private assessments and in some employer screening, and those publish nothing. We name no figure for them, because we have not seen one we could cite.

Questions

Common questions

  • Does Typetera support AZERTY layout?

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    Yes. Typetera measures what your keyboard outputs, so AZERTY, QWERTY-Canadian, BÉPO, or any other French layout works.

  • Is the French typing test free?

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    Yes. No signup, no payment, and nothing advertising around the typing area.

  • Are French accents and ç supported?

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    Yes, the full French character set - é, è, à, ç, ê, î, ô, û, ï, ë, ÿ, œ, æ - appears in the corpus and is fully measured.

  • Why is my French WPM lower than English?

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    By less than you would think. Measured on our own corpora French needs about 0.3% more keystrokes than English, because AZERTY puts its four commonest accents in direct access. A much larger personal gap is usually familiarity with the language rather than the keyboard.

  • Can I practice for a concours with Typetera?

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    The bureautique exercise is 15 minutes on a word processor, a spreadsheet and general office tools, and the framing documents we read set no typing-speed criterion. Practise the software and the accents rather than a speed target, and check the notice for your own concours, because formats differ between the state, territorial and hospital tracks.

  • Does the corpus include French-specific punctuation conventions?

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    Yes. Spaces before colons, semicolons, exclamation marks, and question marks (à la française) are respected in the corpus.

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