墨 SUMI TYPING

A free typing test, painted in living ink

silence, then strike

SUMI TYPING is a free online typing test and practice arena that runs entirely in your browser at sumityping.com. Instead of a blank page and a timer, you type inside living worlds drawn in the spirit of Japanese ink painting — a bonsai that grows as you type, night rivers of lanterns, falling cherry blossoms, drifting snow — each with its own ambient sound, all reacting to your keystrokes.

It measures what every serious typing test measures — words per minute and accuracy, live while you type — and treats the time you spend practicing as something worth making beautiful.

What you get

• Eight modes — from pure timed sprints to an un-timed zen mode, code practice, and a 72-tale story ladder
• Live WPM and accuracy, with an honest net-WPM score comparable to other major typing tests
• A race — ten house rivals from 30 to 400 wpm, or a pace you set yourself
• 39 ink themes — 21 free, three earned at speed marks (never sold), one crowning the complete collection, 14 across four premium packs; 19 are living animated scenes, each hand-built with its own ambient soundscape
• Real customization — word size, line count, difficulty tiers, accent and word inks with a live contrast badge, motion, sound
• A global leaderboard for every test length — sign in with Google if you want your best runs ranked
• A profile seal album — levels, honors, your theme collection, and a practice heatmap
• A full guest mode — no account needed, nothing leaves your browser
• No ads, no install; add it to your device as an app straight from the browser

The eight ways

• 一筆 One Stroke — the core test: 15, 30, 60 or 120 seconds of unbroken ink
• 物語 The Story — 72 long tales on six pace shelves; type at each tale's pace and it unfolds, chapter by chapter, to its end
• 影 Shadow — race the ghost of your own best run
• 稽古 Practice — drills built from your own logged mistakes: the words and keys that actually slow you down
• 鍛冶 The Forge — code and syntax: keywords, operators, brackets — temper your hands
• 座禅 Seated Stillness — long-form calm with no timer; type until you choose to stop
• 忍び Life of Shinobi — slice the words out of the sky before they fall
• 真剣 Live Blade — sudden death: a single wrong strike ends the run

Make it yours

The settings inkstone holds more than a volume slider: word size (S–XL), a 2-, 3- or 4-line reading window, three difficulty tiers that reshape the words in every mode but the story (its tales are fixed), twelve accent inks and eleven word colours with a live WCAG contrast badge for your pick, reactive word heat, keystroke sound and per-scene ambience, motion depth for the living scenes, and a personal seal you carve to stamp your results. Two honest absences: there is no font-family picker, and no custom text upload.

How scoring works

Your speed is reported as net WPM: correctly typed characters, divided by five, per minute — the same convention used by the most popular typing tests, so your score here means the same thing there. Accuracy is counted at strike time: every keystroke matters, including the errors you go back and fix.

Questions

Is it really free?

Yes — the test, all eight modes, the race, the ranking and 21 of the 39 worlds are free. Three reward worlds are earned at speed marks and can never be bought, a fourth crowns owning the complete collection, and the other 14 living scenes belong to four theme packs, arriving with the larger desktop edition on Steam.

What modes are there?

Nine: the timed core test, a 72-tale story ladder typed at each tale's pace, a ghost race against your best run, weakness drills, code and syntax practice, an un-timed zen mode, a falling-words round, and sudden death — plus a race against pacer rivals up to 400 wpm.

Can I customize it?

Yes — word size, line count, difficulty, accent and word colours with a live contrast badge, motion, sound and ambience, and a carved personal seal. No font-family picker, no custom text upload.

Do I need an account?

No. Play as a guest and everything stays in your browser. Google sign-in is only for the global leaderboard.

What does “sumi” mean?

墨 (sumi) is Japanese ink — the black ink of calligraphy and ink-wash painting. The whole game is built around it: a quiet dark, then the strike of the brush.

What devices are supported?

Any modern desktop browser with a physical keyboard — Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari.

Start typing