Five Minute Typing Test on The Wind in the Willows

Type the passage for five minutes; the clock starts with your first key.

Type each word and press space after it. The clock starts on your first key. The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said "Bother!" and "O blow!" and also "Hang spring-cleaning!" and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, "Up we go! Up we go!" till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow. "This is fine!" he said to himself. "This is better than whitewashing!" The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow till he reached the hedge on the further side. "Hold up!" said an elderly rabbit at the gap. "Sixpence for the privilege of passing by the private road!" He was bowled over in an instant by the impatient and contemptuous Mole, who trotted along the side of the hedge chaffing the other rabbits as they peeped hurriedly from their holes to see what the row was about. "Onion-sauce! Onion-sauce!" he remarked jeeringly, and was gone before they could think of a thoroughly satisfactory reply. Then they all started grumbling at each other. "How stupid you are! Why didn't you tell him----" "Well, why didn't you say----" "You might have reminded him----" and so on, in the usual way; but, of course, it was then much too late, as is always the case.
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5 minutes of typing. Words per minute is correct characters divided by five; accuracy is correct keystrokes out of all keystrokes.

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How it works

This 5 minute typing test is the whole first chapter of The Wind in the Willows (1908), cut into nine passages. Type in the box; when a passage ends, the next follows until five minutes are up.

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What five minutes asks of you

In a typing test 5 minutes long, one fast minute is only a fifth of the score. What counts is the pace you hold through capitals, speech marks and semicolons. Five characters make one standard word.

A 5 minute keyboarding test, not a certificate

Job and school keyboarding tests often run five minutes, so practise at that length here. This is a self-test: nobody checks who typed, so it gives no certificate. Ask whoever sets your test for its pass mark.

  • In The Luncheon-Basket the Rat lists a whole picnic without a comma: keep your eyes on the text, not your fingers.
  • Type a dash as two hyphens with no spaces, the way this text sets it.

Questions and answers

How is a five minute typing test scored?

Your speed is correct characters divided by five, per minute, so slips you leave uncorrected do not count toward it. Accuracy shows beside the speed. Your best is kept in this browser only.

Why is my five minute score lower than my one minute score?

Tiredness and text. Over five minutes attention drifts, and this prose has capitals, speech marks and dashes that a one-minute test on common words lacks. Compare a five minute result only with another five minute result.

Why The Wind in the Willows?

It was first published in 1908, so it is in the public domain in the United States, and its first chapter reads well from end to end: the Mole leaves his spring-cleaning, meets the Rat and learns to row.

All 9 passages

The Wind in the Willows (1908), chapter 1 9

  • Hang Spring-Cleaning! The opening of the book: the Mole throws down his brush and tunnels up into the spring sunshine. Long sentences strung on semicolons, and a run of scraped, scratched, scrabbled and scrooged to keep the fingers honest.
  • Hullo, Mole! The Mole finds the river for the first time and meets the Water Rat across it. The transcription prints its all very well without an apostrophe, and that is how it must be typed here.
  • Messing About in Boats The little blue and white boat, and the Rat's most quoted line about messing about in boats. Plenty of short spoken lines, so the Shift key and the speech marks get steady work.
  • The Luncheon-Basket The Rat reels off the whole picnic in one breath, with no commas between the dishes, and the Mole begs him to stop. The book prints the list as one run-together word; here it is typed with spaces. The book spells ecstacies this way.
  • Beyond the Wild Wood The Rat's uneasy talk of the Wild Wood, its weasels and stoats, and the Wide World beyond it. Dashes set as two hyphens break up nearly every speech, as in rabbits--some of 'em.
Show all 9 passages (4 more)

The Wind in the Willows (1908), chapter 1, continued

  • Lunch in the Backwater The Mole unpacks the basket, the Otter hauls himself out calling them greedy beggars, and a first mention of Toad and his brand-new boat. Hyphenated words such as table-cloth and wager-boat come thick and fast.
  • Toad in a Wager-Boat Toad rows past, splashing badly, and the Otter vanishes after a May-fly mid-story. The story breaks off on four full stops: type all four.
  • Ratty, I Want to Row Heading home, the Mole grabs the sculls, and the boat goes over. A passage of quick action with commas between every clause, good for holding speed through punctuation.
  • River Stories Till Supper-Time The Mole apologises, the Rat forgives him, and the evening ends by the fire with river stories. The last part of the chapter, and the one list-like sentence of the book's ideas of adventure: weirs, floods, pike and herons.

How this list was compiled: Nine passages cut from chapter 1, The River Bank, of The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, first published in London by Methuen in 1908 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_in_the_Willows). A work first published before 1931 is in the public domain in the United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_States). The chapter was split at paragraph breaks into parts under 3,000 characters, listed in reading order, so a finished passage rolls into the next. Changes to the text: hard-wrapped lines and paragraphs were joined with single spaces, curly quotation marks were set straight, the underscores that mark italics were removed, and each dash was set as two hyphens (a double dash as four). The Rat's picnic list, printed in the book as one run-together word, is set here with a space between its words, because the test takes no word over 30 letters. Spellings of the time, such as ecstacies and to-day, stay. Characters divided by five give standard words (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute). Titles of the parts and the notes are own work. All checked 2026-09-23. Licence: Public domain in the United States: a novel first published in 1908 (London: Methuen), before 1931 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_States). Part titles and notes are own work.

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