Science Typing Test

Type a passage of real science prose, Latin names, figures and semicolons included.

Type each word and press space after it. The clock starts on your first key. It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
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1 minute 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 science typing test sets sixteen passages by Darwin, Faraday, Lyell and Maxwell: natural history, chemistry, geology and physics from works first printed between 1859 and 1871.

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Scientific words, figures, long sentences

As a scientific word typing test the passages do not go easy: Trifolium pratense, ichthyolites, refrangibility, mica-schist. Figures keep their commas, 8,750 grains and 200,000 square miles. One sentence in A Millionth of a Millimetre runs 106 words before its full stop.

One minute or the whole passage

For a typing test, science prose is long: the shortest passage, The Weight of Hydrogen, is 628 characters, about 126 standard words, so a one-minute run stops mid-passage below 126 WPM. No timer takes you to the last full stop at any speed, and a run ends there even with time left.

Questions and answers

What is a scientific typing speed test?

A typing test set on science writing in place of everyday words. It is scored the same way, net words per minute with accuracy.

Is every passage in this typing speed test scientific?

Yes. All sixteen passages are science writing: four each from On the Origin of Species, The Chemical History of a Candle, The Student's Elements of Geology and an address on physics given at Liverpool in 1870.

Is this the scientific typing test from another site?

No. These passages are this page's own choice from four old books, so a science passage set by a course or a test site will read differently.

All 16 passages

Natural history: On the Origin of Species, 1859 4

  • The Entangled Bank The last paragraph of the book. Capitals name each law in turn, from Growth with Reproduction to Extinction, and three semicolons hold the list together. The one hyphen is in less-improved.
  • Humble-bees, Mice and Cats Two Latin names in brackets, Viola tricolor and Trifolium pratense, with the capital on the first word only. Humble-bees and field-mice take hyphens, and one observer's words come twice in speech marks.
  • Seedling Cabbages Two figures to type, 233 and 78, in a sentence that turns on a colon. Then cabbage-flower with its hyphen, mongrelized with a z, and prepotent twice.
  • Thirty-two Little Trees A heath near Farnham in Surrey. The numbers are written out, thirty-two and twenty-six, and hill-tops and self-sown take hyphens. A colon splits the second sentence.
Show all 16 passages (12 more)

Chemistry: The Chemical History of a Candle, 1861 4

  • An Open Door The opening words of the first lecture. One long dash, typed as two hyphens, and honour with a u. The verb is purpose, not propose: I purpose to bring before you.
  • Carbon and Oxygen by Weight Nine figures in the last two sentences: 6 of carbon and 16 of oxygen make 22 of carbonic acid, and 28 of lime brings it to 50. Lime-water and oyster-shell take hyphens.
  • Five Pints of Air Single digits in running prose: 5 pints of air hold 1 of oxygen and 4 of nitrogen. The last sentence is the long one, 72 words round a single semicolon.
  • The Weight of Hydrogen Figures with commas, 8,750 grains and 1,000 ounces, beside three-quarters and one-twelfth written out. Shew is the book's spelling of show.

Geology: The Student's Elements of Geology, 1871 4

  • The Coal Thicknesses in feet with commas, 11,000 and 12,000, set against 80 seams and 120 feet of coal. The Coal sits in speech marks with its comma inside them.
  • Fresh-water and Marine Fish Eight genus names, each with a capital: Cyprinus, Perca, Esox, Cobitis, Lebias, Cottus, Mugil and Anguilla. Ichthyolites, near the end, is an old word for fossil fish.
  • Laurentian Rocks Rock names in a row, gneiss, mica-schist, quartzite, then two large figures: 30,000 feet and 200,000 square miles. The initials in Sir W.E. Logan are typed with no space.
  • What the Earth Is Made Of The opening paragraph of the first chapter. It gives the Greek behind the word geology, ge and logos, in plain letters, and ends on a sentence of 81 words.

Physics: an address of 1870 4

  • A Millionth of a Millimetre A single sentence from first word to full stop. The sizes are written out: a millionth of a millimetre, the hundred-millionth, the two-thousand-millionth of a centimetre. Shewn is the paper's spelling.
  • A Pint of Water Two sentences only, the first split by a semicolon. Nitrite of butyle comes twice, and Dr is printed with no full stop.
  • Hydrogen in the Stars The paragraph that follows Molecules That Vibrate. Its second sentence runs 81 words without a stop and ends on tuning-forks and two watches.
  • Molecules That Vibrate Spectroscopic, refrangibility and wave-length inside three sentences. A long dash, typed as two hyphens, joins refrangibility to light, and brackets hold the words say, of hydrogen.

How this list was compiled: Sixteen passages chosen for this page from four works of science, four from each. Natural history: Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (London: John Murray, 1859), the text of the first edition; the publisher and the date, 24 November 1859, are from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species. Chemistry: Michael Faraday, The Chemical History of a Candle, a course of six lectures given to a young audience at the Royal Institution, edited by William Crookes; the lectures first came out as a book in 1861 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemical_History_of_a_Candle), and the text followed is the new impression of London: Chatto & Windus, 1908. Geology: Charles Lyell, The Student's Elements of Geology, first published in 1871 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lyell lists the first edition under that year) with a preface dated December 1870; the text followed is the printing of New York: Harper & Brothers, 1878. Physics: James Clerk Maxwell, Address to the Mathematical and Physical Sections of the British Association, given at Liverpool on 15 September 1870 and printed in the Association's Report, volume 40 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Science_Association lists the 40th meeting at Liverpool in 1870). All four were checked 2026-10-08. Each passage is one unbroken run of whole sentences from a single paragraph, word for word; eleven are the whole paragraph, and five start or stop inside it at a sentence end (Humble-bees, Mice and Cats; Thirty-two Little Trees; Carbon and Oxygen by Weight; and the two geology passages that follow a run-in heading, which is left off). The passage names and the notes were written for this page. These changes only were made: lines were joined, curly quotation marks and apostrophes were set straight, each long dash was set as two hyphens, the italics of Latin names are plain, and the two footnote marks in A Millionth of a Millimetre were taken out. The spellings (shew, shewn, fulfil, mongrelized, butyle) and the hyphens (humble-bees, wave-length, mica-schist) are the printings' own. No passage holds a fraction set in figures, a degree sign or a letter outside plain keyboard characters; characters and words were counted, and characters divided by five give standard words (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute). The meaning of ichthyolite in one note is from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ichthyolite (checked 2026-10-08). Texts printed between 1859 and 1908 are in the public domain in the United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_States). Licence: Public domain in the United States: texts printed between 1859 and 1908, all before 1931 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_States). The passage names, the notes, the grouping and the counts are own work.

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