Gujarati typing test
The 600 words Gujarati news writing uses most, on a keyboard you can click if the script is not installed.
InScript, Shruti and the legacy fonts still in circulation
Gujarati typing is less fragmented than Hindi or Bengali, but it carries the same underlying split between real text and font-shaped text.
InScript is the standard layout for Unicode Gujarati and the one the Indian government specifies. It shares its design logic with the other Indian InScript layouts: vowels on the left, consonants on the right, alphabetical order rather than frequency order. Learn it for one Indian script and the shape of it transfers to the others.
Shruti is the Unicode Gujarati font Windows ships, and it is doing more work than it appears to. Conjunct forms are not typed directly — you type consonant, virama, consonant, and substitution tables inside the font decide which single joined shape to draw. Conjuncts of three or more consonants need a virama between each one. The virama sits on the apostrophe key.
Terafont and the other legacy Gujarati fonts are the equivalent of Hindi's Kruti Dev: still used in print and design work, still requiring dedicated input software, and still producing text that is not Gujarati underneath. Anything typed that way has to be converted before it can be searched, posted or sent.
This test reads Unicode, so InScript, phonetic input and the on-screen keyboard below all work. Legacy-font input does not.
What this word list actually measures
Gujarati words in this list run longer than Hindi or Bengali ones and stack more often than either. Counted from the exact list served above:
The gap between those middle two numbers is the whole reason this test exists. A word here takes about 4.93 keystrokes to build but occupies 2.79 visual units on the page — a ratio of 1.77 to one. On this word list that convention would report roughly 1.8 times the words-per-minute figure shown here, because it counts the keystrokes hidden inside conjuncts as if they were separate letters.
What to do with a formal word list
The vocabulary here comes from published Gujarati, and that shapes how to use it. The connectives and reporting verbs that dominate news writing are exactly the words you will type most if you work in Gujarati professionally, so the list is well matched to office and study use and poorly matched to chat.
The key to watch is the virama, sitting on the apostrophe. It is the busiest key in Gujarati typing and the one least likely to be where your hand expects it, because no Latin layout puts anything important there. Every conjunct runs through it, and a three-consonant conjunct needs it twice.
If you have typed Devanagari before, budget time for ળ specifically. Gujarati uses it and Hindi does not, so a Hindi-trained hand has simply never been asked for that key. It will show up on your missed-character list long after the rest of the board feels automatic.
A note on where these words came from
Worth stating plainly, because it affects what you are practising on. These 600 words are drawn from a Gujarati news corpus, ordered by how often each one actually appears. The practical effect is that the vocabulary leans towards the register of published writing: reporting verbs, institutional nouns, the connectives that hold formal sentences together. That is good practice material if you type Gujarati for work or study, and slightly formal if what you want is conversational speed.
It also means a handful of words reflect what Gujarati newspapers were writing about when the corpus was collected. Frequency lists are photographs of a moment, not neutral samples of a language, and no typing test that uses one is exempt from that.
The same list feeds the autocomplete on our Gujarati keyboard, so the two agree with each other by construction rather than by anyone remembering to keep them in step.
Where Gujarati typing slows down
The virama, on the apostrophe key
Every conjunct runs through it, and a three-consonant conjunct needs it twice. It is the busiest key on the board and the least obvious one.
The vowel sign displayed before its consonant
કિ puts િ on the left and is typed on the right. Logical order, visual order, and they disagree.
Candrabindu against anusvara
ઁ and ં are different characters that look similar at text size and sit apart on the layout.
The retroflex letter Hindi does not have
Gujarati and Marathi both use ળ; Hindi does not. If you learned Devanagari InScript first, this key has no equivalent in your muscle memory.
Sources
The InScript and Shruti claims above were checked against published layout documentation. Gujarati exam requirements were not stated here, because no primary source for them could be confirmed.
If you came here to write, not to be measured
To write Gujarati rather than race it, use the Gujarati keyboard — full layout, predictive text and an editor. The other scripts are on the typing test hub.
