According to Martin Krzywinski, a Canadian specialist in bioinformatics (who should know about difficult-to-type words, given his last name!), these are some of the hardest words to type on a standard QWERTY keyboard:

pizazz
piazzas
pizzas
suburban
assuming
obstinance
foramens

The difficulty of these words was determined by the physical effort used to type them. Doubled letters can be hard, especially when the letter is typed with one of the little fingers, and that’s why double-z words appear on this list so frequently. Odd and awkward letter patterns, or groups of letters that are easy to confuse, make for hard-to-type words as well. In addition, unfamiliar words (like foramens) are hard to type, because the typist doesn’t have the advantage of “muscle memory” that comes from the repeated typing of more common words.

However, even words that might be typed often still can cause problems. If you look through typing-related forums or message boards, you’ll see words like existentialism, sovereignty, and dachshund (words that people find hard to spell in general, not just to type) but also words like their, which many people constantly mistype as thier, getting the two index-finger vowels out of order. If you’ve been touch typing for a while, you might have identified your own stumbling blocks: one or two words that seem to always come out wrong. Check the Typesy lesson list to see if there’s an exercise that you can use to focus on correcting those words in the future, or just spend some time practicing the words that slow you down.

Things that tend to really trip people up when they’re typing are often not related to letter order. One common error people report is accidentally missing a capitalization, or accidentally typing two capital letters in a row. These are definitely typing errors, but they’re also common enough that most word processing programs either automatically correct them, or allow you to set flags that catch and change the error as you type. We don’t recommend counting on this sort of automatic editor, but it might be a good backup.

What word(s) do you find hardest to type correctly?