Learning stenography (how to type really fast)

Created 5/21/2026, 4:36:54 PM

I type at around 100 words per minute (WPM). This is relatively fast; for reference the average person types at around 40 to 50 WPM.[1] Still, oftentimes I feel like I'm typing much slower than I want to be. I oftentimes say stuff out loud and try to write it down, and at my current typing speed I just can't really keep up. And my thinking speed is even faster than my speaking speed.

Currently, I type using mostly my index fingers, with the other fingers sometimes used for keys in the extremities of the keyboard. This certainly isn't the most /optimal/ way to type; most typing education recommends touch typing[a], or using all five fingers on each hand to type.* I /could/ learn this, it probably wouldn't be too hard, but I'd basically have to relearn how to type. Even with touch typing, at most I'm looking at maybe an extra 20WPM? That didn't exactly seem worth it to me.

[a] touch typing

While doing research on how to type faster, I found a little thing called stenography[b]. Stenography is the use of a specialized chorded keyboard to input words, as opposed to a traditional serial keyboard.

[b] stenography

[c] chord

Stenography is traditionally used in situations where you need to do live transcription of words being said (for example, in court reporting or live captioning). This requires /much/ higher WPM than is typical of typists; native speakers of English usually speak anywhere from 111 to 291(!) WPM,[2] and so the speed of professional stenographers needs to match.

For something so niche and specialized, you'd think it would be hard for the average person to get into, but you'd be wrong. There's a reasonably sized hobbyist stenography[d] community with entirely open source hardware and reasonably priced† hardware.

[d] hobbyist stenography

Of course, there's a reason we aren't all using chorded layouts everywhere. There is /much/ more of a learning curve to them compared to typical serial keyboards. I've seen the difficulty of stenography compared to that of learning a musical instrument, and that seems about apt.

So, given that I had to relearn typing /anyway/ to be able to type faster, my thought process went "fuck it, if I'm going to do this I might as well go all in" and I've now started learning stenography. I mean also, it just seemed fun (and it is!)

So, this article will be some explanations of basic stenography concepts as well as my experience with it so far. Keep in mind I'm still rather new to the whole thing, and I'm not very good with it, so take what my explanations and opinions with a grain of salt.

1. Lapwing

A *theory* is a set of rules, usually accompanied by a keyboard layout, that is used to translate strokes to words (or parts of words). There are many theories to choose from, and at first I went with a theory called *Lapwing[e]*. It seemed like the modern and sensible choice to go with of those which I could find at the time.

[e] Lapwing

Lapwing uses the typical "Ireland" layout, which looks like this:

Ireland layout. From the /Plover wiki/, under the Creative Commons Attributions license.

This keyboard looks a little odd at first glance.

The first thing you might notice is that there's a lot of missing keys; you won't be able to find "q" or "i" or "n" anywhere on this keyboard. This is because there's no need for many less common keys; you can simply type them via /combinations/ of others. For example, in Lapwing, "n" is typed as `TPH` (that is, `T`, `P`, and `H` at the same time), "i" is typed as `EU`, "b" is `PW`, so on and so forth. Most of these have to be memorized, not too dissimilar from memorizing the positions of keys on a normal serial keyboard.‡

You might also notice that there's some duplicate keys. There's an "s" on the left and on the right, for example. These keys represent sounds in different /places/ in a word. Specifically, the keys and chords on the left hand represent sounds at the start of a word, and the keys and chords on the right represent sounds at the end of a word, with the vowels on the thumbs being inserted in the middle.

The set of keys used to type a word is called its outline. Slashes are used to separate individual strokes in each outline (as some words need to be typed with multiple strokes). For example, the outline for "complicate" is `KOPL/PHREU/KAEUT`; left and right hand keys are separated by the vowels (when no vowel is used in a stroke, `-` is written instead.) This is broken down as:

These line up with how the word is pronounced rather than how it is spelt (i.e. it's /phonetic/ rather than /orthographic/). This is true of a lot of stenography theories, Lapwing included.

In the case that multiple words are homophonic (i.e. share the same pronounciation but are spelt differently), such as "pear" and "pair", there exist a whole host of "conflict resolution" rules that modify certain things within a stroke. In Lapwing, these typically change what vowel chord to use; for example the [eɪ] ("ay") as in "p*a*ir" is typically stroked *AEU*, however in certain cases, *AE* may be used instead. There are dozens of these rules, and while they are all technically perfectly regular, it's a lot to hold in your head and memorize. It gets very complicated very fast and there's a pretty steep learning curve.

In addition, there's what's called *brief*s, which are irregular shorter ways to type common whords. For example, "other" is can be stroked as `O*T/KWRER`, however it may be typed in one stroke as `OER`. In fact, the use of some briefs is actually /mandatory/, to leave space for other parts of the theory. For example, "the" has to be typed as `-T` and not `THE` (as that stroke is used for something else).

So, the rules of a theory determine what the outlines of each word /should/ be. The way the computer actually knows what a stroke should type is via what's called a /dictionary/, which is effectively a giant lookup table of outlines to words. In addition, Plover[f] (the software used for hobbyist stenography) allows you to add custom entries to your dictionary, if there's a word that isn't in the theory or if you want to create a custom brief.

[f] Plover

I've had a lot of trouble with Lapwing. For one, there's just the base complexity of all the conflict resolution rules, as well as some of the rules regarding how words are linked together when they're made up of multiple strokes. But another issue is that English dialects are /extremely variable/. For example, a few of the vowels that Lapwing uses are different in my dialect, and I just have to cope with that; luckily, it's usually in ways such that I can then rely on the spelling, but it could be worse for other dialects. Regardless, it's still a lot to keep track of to have to simultaneously consider both the /pronounciation/ and the /spelling/ of a word to determine what its outline should be.

I never got very good at Lapwing; I topped out at around 4WPM, and that's when I was lucky. And my accuracy was consistently terrible; there's just so many rules to keep track of. I will admit, this is kind of a skill issue; I could learn this stuff and eventually become good at it, but to be honest it just felt overly complicated.

It also doesn't help that when I make a mistake, it could be either:

These are exacerbated by the fact that it's really hard to read where your mistake /was/ just by looking at the output. I would have to reverse engineer the typed out word to figure out what strokes are needed to press it, and from there figure out what my mistake was and then correct it. Sometimes I would make different ones of these mistakes in sequence when trying to type a single word.

So, after about a month or two of on-and-off practice (if you count only the "on" part of that, I'd probably say it's about 1 to 3 weeks), I decided to switch theories.

2. Pinchord

[g] Pinchord

Furthermore, almost every stroke will produce characters, even if it's not a word that exists; unlike other theories, Pinchord doesn't have a fixed dictionary of words; instead, the chords are mapped one-to-one with characters. Other theories typically have a separate "fingerspelling" system that lets you input characters serially (for when you need to type something outside of the theory on-the-fly without modifying it), however this is typically very slow; in Pinchord there's no such separation.¶

This appeals to me a lot. I already have the spellings for every word I use memorized (as is true of most native English speakers), and even when speaking or hearing someone speak my brain sometimes thinks of the spelling of words being said.#

Pinchord's layout looks like this:

Pinchord layout. From /graph.dev/.

(Note: Although it is staggered in this image, my board has the keys in a neat row. This doesn't really affect much ergonomics-wise.)

Like the Ireland layout, many keys are missing or duplicated for the same reasons. There's few other keys; the two *suffix keys* in dark green append a single letter to the end of the current stroke, so:

The `#` key capitalizes the current stroke (`TOM` → tom, `#TOM` → Tom), and the `+` key joins the current stroke to the previous one (`WORK/SHOP` → work shop, `WORK/+SHOP` → workshop), which is how all multi-stroke words are typed. Having to press `+` all the time /seems/ like it'd be annoying, but in practice you get used to it fairly quickly.

Briefs are completely separate from normal chords; chords containing `AOIU` are reserved for briefs. You can insert whatever you want there and it will have no conflicts with anything else. This isn't my /favorite/ part of Pinchord to be honest (the fact that you can't use vowels in briefs because of it is a little annoying) but I don't really see what a better solution would be. No other chords can really be used because every non-`AIOU` stroke in Pinchord is mapped to /something/.

I've had a much, /much/ better time learning Pinchord. For one, only considering spelling is much less of a mental load; it eliminates a large amount of rules and things to memorize. All that you have to memorize under Pinchord is all the chords for letters/letter combinations not directly on the keyboard.

In addition, because the output is transparently related to what keys you pressed, mistakes are very easy to find. I can very easily tell what I did wrong when looking at the output of a mistaken stroke, and fix it much quicker than I could with Lapwing.

I've been practicing Pinchord for about a week now, and I'm much faster than I ever was with Lapwing. I'm at ~12WPM, which isn't great but I'm improving at a very steady rate. I could probably get this good at Lapwing if I tried harder, but Pinchord is, in my opinion, wayyyyy less anoying.

3. Comparison of Approaches

So, I like Pinchord a lot. However, I'm not going to say its approach is perfect by any means. Going for a pure spelling approach has a lot of benefits, but it's not without its downsides.

For one, as mentioned earlier, there is absolutely /no/ space for briefs. You need to do the janky `AIOU` stuff to have them. In Lapwing, on the other hand, you might just be able to take a stroke from the middle of a word, or merge parts of strokes together, and a lot of the time it'll end up not being assigned to anything so you can give it a brief.

Also, Lapwing strokes have the potential to be a shorter in cases where the word's pronounciation is shorter than its spelling. For example, the Lapwing outline for "chocolate" is `KHOBG/HRAT` ("choc/lat"), while in Pinchord you need to type out each part manually, giving `SPWHO/+SPWO/+HRATe` ("cho/co/late"). Pinchord's `-e` and `-s` keys help a little with this, but it doesn't exactly solve the problem.**

Generally though, I'm willing to sacrifice a little bit of speed for the ease of use. I intend to fill some of the gaps using some systematic briefs (Pinchord, in its current state, doesn't actually come with any! You have to make them yourself.) which will probably be enough for my use-case.

Another supposed benefit of phonetic theories is that, when they're being used for live transcription, translating people's words to strokes is less mental load given you don't have to think about spelling as much. I'm a little skeptical of this myself, given (a) how easily I think of spellings anyway, and (b) that you still have to consider spellings for a lot of words; it still might be true though, I don't know. I don't think there's any hard evidence either way, so I'd like to see a study about this in the future. Regardless, my main use of stenography is to type fast, not to do live transcription, so this doesn't really matter for me (although I may try doing live transcription at some point just for fun).

4. Boards

There are a lot of hobbyist stenography boards to choose from. At first, I just started on my normal QWERTY keyboard. The issue with this is that most keyboards are not designed to be chorded keyboards; they usually only support like, 4 keys being pressed at the same time.†† So I decided to buy the Asterisk[h], which is the cheapest stenography keyboard you can possibly buy.

[h] Asterisk

This was a mistake. I don't think the Asterisk is a bad board, but it's really only good if you're already good with the layout. This is because you have to /hover your hands/ over the keys, so I'd constantly be pressing the wrong key because my hands got misaligned with the board. There's also barely any haptic feedback when you hit a part of the board that's not a key (except if you happen to hit one of the areas with a hole), so it's just very annoying.

I then spent even more money getting a board that I actually like, the Polyglot[i] (sold by the same company). It's a lot more expensive than the Asterisk, but it has way more keys, supports a QWERTY mode (good for using stenography for chat in a video game), and you can actually feel the keys on the keyboard.

[i] Polyglot

I could've saved $50 if I didn't buy the Asterisk, but you can only really know if something's good by trying it, so I try not to feel /too/ bad about it.

5. Conclusion

Stenography is fun (I mean, I probably wouldn't be going through this much effort to learn it if it wasn't), and I'm enjoying it so far. I can't wait until my WPM is reasonable and I can actually start using it for things (I still typed this article with my normal QWERTY keyboard).

If this at all piqued your interest, I highly checking out any of the following links:

Wikipedia page for Stenotype

Open Steno website

Plover wiki

Lapwing book

Pinchord web page

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