Guinness World Records gives 360 wpm with 97.23% accuracy as the highest achieved speed using a stenotype.

While training dropout rates are very high - in some cases only 10% or even fewer graduate - stenotype students are usually able to reach speeds of 100–120 wpm within six months, which is faster than most alphanumeric typists. Stenotype keyboards enable the trained user to input text as fast as 360 wpm at very high accuracy for an extended period, which is sufficient for real-time activities such as court reporting or closed captioning. From the 1920s through the 1970s, typing speed (along with shorthand speed) was an important secretarial qualification, and typing contests were popular and often publicized by typewriter companies as promotional tools.

Two-finger typists, sometimes also referred to as ' hunt and peck' typists, commonly reach sustained speeds of about 37 wpm for memorized text and 27 wpm when copying text, but in bursts may be able to reach much higher speeds. Typically, professional typists type at speeds of 43 to 80 wpm, while some positions can require 80 to 95 (usually the minimum required for dispatch positions and other time-sensitive typing jobs), and some advanced typists work at speeds above 120 wpm. With the onset of the era of desktop computers, fast typing skills became much more widespread. In the same study, when the group was divided into 'fast', 'moderate', and 'slow' groups, the average speeds were 40 wpm, 35 wpm, and 23 wpm, respectively. found in one study of average computer users in 1999 that the average rate for transcription was 32.5 words per minute, and 19.0 words per minute for composition.

For example, under such a method applied to plain English text the phrase 'I run' counts as one word, but 'rhinoceros' and 'let's talk' would both count as two. Since words vary in length, for the purpose of measurement of text entry the definition of each 'word' is often standardized to be five characters or keystrokes long in English, including spaces and punctuation. Words per minute, commonly abbreviated wpm (sometimes uppercased WPM), is a measure of words processed in a minute, often used as a measurement of the speed of typing, reading or Morse code sending and receiving.

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