Hey, fellow keyboard warrior.
Quick question: when you blow a race, where did you actually lose the time?
Be honest. You don't know. Nobody knows. The race ends, you get a number, you move on. 150 WPM. 87 WPM. Whatever. The wreckage scrolls off the screen and your brain remembers "I was fast" or "I was slow" — not "I tripped on the word through for the fourth race in a row."
Here's the thing I noticed after looking at a few hundred million keystrokes of TyprX race data:
Most racers don't have a typing speed problem. They have a 10-word problem.
The 10 words that own you
If you've raced more than a couple dozen times, there's a tiny set of words — usually under a dozen — that account for most of your errors and a wildly disproportionate share of your slow keystrokes.
It's almost never the words you'd guess. It's not "necessarily" or "anachronistic." It's stuff like:
- through (your right hand fumbles the r-o-u rollover)
- public (you mistype it as publlic once a week, for years)
- would / could / should (you flip the ou to uo)
- the typed as teh when you're tired
- whatever digraph your left pinky refuses to learn
You don't notice them because each one costs you maybe 80ms and one backspace. But they fire over and over, race after race, and they're invisible against the average. Your WPM number smears them across thousands of keystrokes. The damage is real; the signal is hidden.
This is the Pareto principle wearing a keyboard. A handful of words own most of your mistakes. Beat those, and your number moves.
What we built
We just shipped drill mode on TyprX, and it's built around exactly this insight.
Here's the mechanic. While you race, the client captures every keystroke — the character, the timestamp, whether it was correct. At race end, that telemetry goes back to the server. A background job maps every error position to the word that contained it, normalizes punctuation, and bumps a per-(you, word) counter.
Over a few dozen races, a picture forms. Not "you type at 90 WPM." Something sharper:
- public — 14 attempts, 9 errors, avg 142ms/char
- through — 22 attempts, 6 errors, avg 119ms/char
- because — 31 attempts, 4 errors, avg 98ms/char
Each word gets a friction score that combines error rate and slowness vs. your personal baseline. The top 10 are your worst words.
Now here's the satisfying part. Click "Start drill," and the server synthesizes a brand-new one-shot quote that hits each of those 10 words at least three times, in varied contexts. You race that quote, solo, against the clock.
That's it. No lessons. No "place your fingers on ASDF." No 40-page curriculum. Just: here are the 10 words you actually suck at, here is a race built entirely out of them, go.
The level-up moment
After you finish a drill, we take a snapshot of what your worst-10 looked like at the start. Next time you visit /drills, we diff it against your current list.
If a word that was in your worst-10 has since fallen out of the top 10, you get a green "Level up!" banner: you used to suck at "public." You don't anymore.
If a word is still on the list but you're now ≥5% faster per character on it, you get a blue "Faster per char" banner: you still mistype it, but your fingers are learning the shape.
The snapshot is single-shot. We consume it on display, so the banner only fires when there's a new drill in between. No fake celebrations. No vague "great job!" — actual, measurable, "this specific word got better" proof.
This is the part I'm most happy about. Improvement in typing is usually invisible. Your WPM goes from 87 to 89 over a month and you can't feel the difference. But "I used to bomb through every race and now I don't" — that you can feel.
The Weekly Hard Word (a community angle)
There's a sister feature: every Monday at midnight Central, TyprX publishes one shared brutal phrase that everyone races against. Same text, all week, public leaderboard.
These are phrases hand-picked to be nasty in interesting ways — digraph-heavy, awkward number runs, punctuation traps, words that visually look like other words. Stuff that would never come up in a normal race quote pool but is exactly what exposes the weak edges in your typing.
You can race it once or twenty times. The leaderboard at /drills/weekly shows where you land. Next Monday, new phrase, fresh fight.
Why this works (and why "general practice" doesn't)
The conventional advice — "type more, you'll get faster" — isn't wrong. But it's incredibly inefficient. If 80% of your errors come from 10 words, then every minute you spend racing text that doesn't contain those words is a minute spent reinforcing what your fingers already know.
Targeted reps on the specific failure modes is how every other skill domain works. Golfers don't fix their slice by playing more 18-hole rounds. Musicians don't fix the tricky measure by playing the whole piece end-to-end. They isolate the failure, drill it cold, then put it back into the flow.
That's all drill mode is. Isolate. Drill. Put it back.
Try it
If you've raced enough that we have telemetry on you, your worst-words card is live right now at . Click "Start drill" and you'll be in a synthesized race in about two seconds. (We skip the 9-second lobby wait — you're racing yourself, there's nobody to wait for.)
If you're new and haven't built up history yet, there are five curated drill packs to get you started: Top 100 Words, Awkward Digraphs, Code Symbols, Numbers & Dates, Spelling Traps. Same mechanic, hand-picked word lists.
Find out what your 10 are. Beat them. Then find the next 10.
Ready to race? https://typrx.com/drills
-- Daniel
Daniel @supercobra
Founder - Ultimate Typing Championship & TyprX