Bengali typing test
Bangla as it is actually written — the 600 most frequent words, conjuncts included, counted the way the script reads.
Bijoy, Avro and UniBijoy — the split that decides your speed
Bengali typing carries a division that most scripts never had to deal with: the same keyboard layout can produce two completely different kinds of text.
Bijoy, developed by Mustafizur Rahman at Ananda Computers, became the de facto standard in Bangladesh and is still the layout used across government offices, courts and educational institutions. It is what the Bangladesh Public Service Commission expects in BCS cadre typing tests, and what NTRCA teacher-registration exams require. Bijoy output is ANSI — legacy encoding — so it needs its matching font installed to display as Bengali at all.
Avro, from OmicronLab, went the other way: phonetic input producing Unicode. You type amar and get আমার. It is the reason Bengali became usable on the open web, because Unicode text renders anywhere without shipping a font alongside it.
UniBijoy is the bridge, and it is the practical answer for most people caught between the two. It keeps Bijoy's key positions exactly — so decades of muscle memory still work — while emitting Unicode. Typists who learned Bijoy for an exam can move to modern software without relearning the board.
In India, West Bengal government work more often uses the InScript Bengali layout, which shares its logic with the other Indian InScript layouts rather than with Bijoy.
This test measures Unicode Bengali, so Avro, UniBijoy and InScript all work here directly. Classic Bijoy does not, because the characters it produces are not Bengali as far as any Unicode-aware program is concerned.
What this word list actually measures
Bengali stacks nearly as hard as Devanagari and does it with a smaller letter inventory, which is why conjuncts carry so much of the load. Counted from the exact list this test serves:
The gap between those middle two numbers is the whole reason this test exists. A word here takes about 4.21 keystrokes to build but occupies 2.53 visual units on the page — a ratio of 1.66 to one. On this word list that convention would report roughly 1.7 times the words-per-minute figure shown here, because it counts the keystrokes hidden inside conjuncts as if they were separate letters.
Settle the layout question before you practise anything
Bengali is the one language here where practising before deciding is actively wasteful. Bijoy and Avro are not two roads to the same place: one trains finger positions for individual letters, the other trains you to spell in Latin and let an engine convert. Hours in Avro build almost no Bijoy muscle memory. If an exam is in your future, find out which layout it names first, and spend your practice there.
Once that is settled, the drill that matters in Bangla is juktakkhor. Look at the missed-character list after a run — it will be dominated by হসন্ত sequences and by the dotted pairs ড় ঢ় য়. Those dotted letters deserve special attention because the failure is invisible: the word looks right on screen and compares as wrong, so you can practise a mistake for weeks without noticing it.
Two minutes is the right length once you are past the beginner stage. Bengali words in this list run long, and a fifteen-second burst rewards guessing where a two-minute run punishes it.
What Bangla typing exams are actually testing
The thing worth knowing before you practise: BPSC and NTRCA typing tests are layout tests as much as speed tests. They specify Bijoy, and a candidate who is fast in Avro phonetic can be slow to the point of failing on a Bijoy board, because phonetic typing never trains finger positions for individual Bengali letters at all — the engine does the spelling.
If an exam is your reason for practising, find out which layout the exam specifies before you put hours into any of them. If you are typing for work, email or writing, the Unicode question matters more than the layout question: text that is not Unicode cannot be searched, cannot be copied into a web form, and will not survive being sent to somebody who does not have your font.
This test is useful for the second case, and for building raw speed and accuracy in the first. It is not a Bijoy simulator.
The characters Bangla typists lose time on
Hasanta and the juktakkhor
ক্ষ, ঞ্চ and স্ত are single shapes built from three keystrokes each. Hasanta is the join. Miss it and you get two loose letters that look almost right and compare as wrong.
The dotted pair
ড় ঢ় য় each exist as one codepoint and as base-plus-nukta. Identical on screen, different as data. This is the single most common source of a "correct" word being marked incorrect.
The vowel that appears first
কি shows ি to the left of ক but is typed after it. In Bijoy you type it in visual order; in Unicode you type it in logical order. Switching systems inverts the habit.
Anusvara against ঙ
বাংলা uses ং, not ঙ. They read similarly and sit in different places on every layout.
Sources
Bijoy's role in Bangladesh government offices and in BPSC and NTRCA typing tests, and the UniBijoy keymap, were checked against published documentation rather than recalled.
If you came here to write, not to be measured
If you want to write Bangla rather than be timed on it, the Bengali keyboard is the tool — full layout, predictive text, and a juktakkhor engine that handles the conjuncts this test only measures. The other languages are on the typing test hub.
