Some things you probably didn’t know about Typeracer in 2014…
Anybody who’s been on Typeracer for a while will know that the site is a platform for people all around the world to motivate each other to improve their typing speed through friendly competition. I’ve always enjoyed racing against typists from so many different countries, and in my years playing Typeracer, I’ve gotten to know interesting typists from all over. I’ve made friends with the man once called the fastest French typist in the world (motsak), and had opportunities to talk to the infamous self-proclaimed fastest typist in Italy (mattbovino) as well as Brazilian typing legend Guilherme Sandrini/Kukkain (kfzx). All of these guys have been nice enough to give me an experience that I usually don’t have: the experience of losing races, over and over again.
Chimchim’s 100,000th race on Typeracer, on March 23rd, 2012
There are also endurance typists Dominic Dufour (dufour) of Canada, RambooUAE (killingtype) of the United Arab Emirates, and our all-time “most-races” champion, Chim Chim (chimchimchim) of the United States. I was pleased to have a chance to be in the racetrack with Chim Chim as he completed his 100,000th race. See the picture to the right; I won, by the way :)
Thinking about this great group of folks, and the diversity they represent, I started wondering which countries our users are actually coming from, and how they compare on the racetrack. Rather than anecdotal approximations, I decided to get all the data from 2014. Or, to be more specific, I should say that I made Typeracer founder Alex Ephsteyn download millions of races of data from our servers, and then sort, filter, and organize them for me so that I could write this blog post!
Take a look at the lists below (full raw data available here). Note that this data is based only on races finished by registered users, not guests.
Countries with most races finished in 2014
| Rank | Country | Races Finished |
| 1 | United States | 3,401,411 |
| 2 | India | 839,282 |
| 3 | Canada | 477,695 |
| 4 | Philippines | 388,349 |
| 5 | United Kingdom | 354,841 |
| 6 | Australia | 231,580 |
| 7 | Vietnam | 216,164 |
| 8 | Japan | 158,678 |
| 9 | Pakistan | 134,279 |
| 10 | Germany | 116,717 |
| 11 | Sweden | 112,388 |
| 12 | Indonesia | 108,129 |
| 13 | Singapore | 84,003 |
| 14 | Malaysia | 81,995 |
| 15 | Thailand | 71,491 |
| 16 | Netherlands | 64,212 |
| 17 | Hong Kong | 63,903 |
| 18 | Poland | 59,698 |
| 19 | Antarctica | 58,583 |
| 20 | Norway | 57,933 |
But what about speed? Which country had the fastest typists?
Countries with fastest average WPM in 2014*
| Rank | Country | Avg. Speed |
| 1 | Netherlands | 68.6 wpm |
| 2 | Singapore | 66.4 wpm |
| 3 | Canada | 66.0 wpm |
| 4 | Australia | 64.2 wpm |
| 5 | Norway | 63.5 wpm |
| 6 | Denmark | 62.7 wpm |
| 7 | Sweden | 61.7 wpm |
| 8 | Germany | 61.5 wpm |
| 9 | United States | 60.4 wpm |
| 10 | Brazil | 60.1 wpm |
| 11 | United Kingdom | 59.8 wpm |
| 12 | Hong Kong | 56.4 wpm |
| 13 | New Zealand | 53.4 wpm |
| 14 | Malaysia | 52.3 wpm |
| 15 | Thailand | 52.2 wpm |
| 16 | Vietnam | 47.3 wpm |
| 17 | Indonesia | 47.3 wpm |
| 18 | Pakistan | 44.7 wpm |
| 19 | India | 44.4 wpm |
| 20 | Philippines | 44.4 wpm |
* not counting countries with less than 800 users.
How do typists from the Netherlands and Singapore type so fast? Or are the folks from these countries who use Typeracer not a representative sample for some reason? We’re not sure, but anyway, we hope to see you on the racetrack soon, representing your country!
-David Pritts (valikor)
