Lowercase words are a clean way to measure speed, but they are not what you type all day. Messages, code comments, and documents are full of capitals, commas, and the odd number. The mode bar on the typing test now has four new options to practise exactly that.
Punctuation
Sentences start with a capital letter and end with a full stop, question mark, or exclamation mark. In between you will meet commas, colons, semicolons, quotes, and brackets. It is the fastest way to find out how much the shift key and the top-right corner of your keyboard are slowing you down.
Numbers
Roughly one word in seven becomes a number of up to four digits. Number rows are where accuracy usually drops first, so this is a good drill if your scores dip whenever a date or a price shows up.
Easy and hard words
Easy sticks to short words of five letters or fewer, which is good for warming up or for building rhythm. Hard uses only words of seven letters or more, which rewards steady accuracy over bursts. Click the same option again to go back to the normal mix.
How they combine
They work with both time and words mode, and punctuation and numbers combine with either word list: punctuation with hard words is a proper workout. Your choice is kept in the URL, so a reload or a link you send opens the same test. On a phone, everything lives behind the Test Settings button above the text.
What stays the same
Runs with any of these options turned on are practice. They are not saved to your profile and do not appear on the leaderboard, because the leaderboard compares plain-word runs and a punctuation run would be unfair to both sides. The result screen tells you when a run is practice and lists the options it used.
With every option off, the test is exactly what it was before, down to how the words are picked.
Try it yourself
Open the typing test and see the change for yourself.