60
seconds
Every word is written back to front on screen: eht, dlrow, gnipyt. You type it the right way round. Your eyes have to work much harder than your hands.
A normal timed test with one twist: every word is shown back to front. You see esuoh and type house. The letters are the right way up and the scoring is exactly the same as the standard test, so the only thing that changes is how hard the words are to read. Choose 15, 30, 60 or 120 seconds above.
Fast typists do not read letter by letter. They see a word whole, often while still typing the one before it, and their hands produce it from memory. The backwards test takes that shortcut away. Your eyes have to work out each word before your hands can start, and that pause shows how much of your speed comes from reading rather than from your fingers.
It is also a good test of whether you really touch type. If your hands know where every key is, they keep up comfortably once you have the word. If you are still glancing down at the keyboard, the extra reading effort tends to make that obvious.
Backwards belongs to a family of challenges that are hard on the eyes. Mirror reflects each line, Upside down turns the whole passage over, and Read ahead hides each word the moment you start it. They are all on the typing challenges page. For a speed challenge with no tricks, try the no backspace test.
Backwards has its own leaderboard for each length. Sign in to put your best runs on it next to your character, or play as a guest and keep your results in your browser.
No. The words are displayed back to front, but you type them normally. So when you see dlrow, you type world. The challenge is in reading, not typing: your eyes have to unscramble each word before your hands can go.
Fluent readers recognise whole words at a glance, and they rely on the start of a word to do it. Reversing the letters breaks that, so you end up reading letter by letter. Expect a much lower score than usual at first. It climbs quickly over a few runs.
Not quite. Mirror flips each whole line like a reflection, so the letters themselves are reversed shapes. Backwards keeps every letter the right way up and only reverses their order. Both are in the typing challenges, and they train slightly different kinds of reading.
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