Words per minute (WPM) is a measure of typing speed, commonly used in recruitment. For the purposes of WPM measurement a word is standardized to five characters or keystrokes. Therefore, 'brown' counts as one word, but 'accounted' counts as two. The benefits of a standardized measurement of input speed are that it enables comparison across language and hardware boundaries. The speed of an Afrikaans-speaking operator in Cape Town can be compared with a French-speaking operator in Paris. (Wikipedia)