QWERTY, (pronounced ) is the most common modern-day keyboard layout on English language computer and typewriter keyboards. It takes its name from the first six letters seen in the keyboard's top first row of letters. The QWERTY design was patented by Christopher Sholes in 1868 and sold to Remington in 1873, when it first appeared in typewriters.

Purpose

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Frequently used pairs of letters were separated in an attempt to stop the typebars from intertwining and becoming stuck, thus forcing the typist to manually unstick the typebars and also frequently blotting the document^*. The home row (ASDFGHJKL) of the QWERTY layout is thought to be a remnant of the old alphabetical layout that QWERTY replaced. QWERTY also attempted to alternate keys between hands, allowing one hand to move into position while the other hand strikes home a key. This sped up both the original double-handed hunt-and-peck technique and the later touch typing technique; however, single-handed words such as stewardesses and monopoly show flaws in the alternation.

Minor changes to the arrangement are made for other languages; for example, German keyboards add umlauts to the right of "P" and "L", and interchange the "Z" and "Y" keys both because "Z" is a much more common letter than "Y" in German (the letter seldom appearing except in borrowed words), and because "T" and "Z" often appear next to each other in the German language; consequently, they are known as QWERTZ keyboards. French keyboards interchange both "Q" and "W" with "A" and "Z", and move "M" to the right of "L"; they are known as AZERTY keyboards. Italian typewriter keyboards (but not most computer keyboards) use a QZERTY layout where "Z" is swapped with "W" and "M" is at the right of "L". Portuguese keyboards maintain the QWERTY layout but add an extra key: the letter "C" with cedilla (Ç) after the "L" key. In this place, the Spanish version has the letter "N" with tilde (Ñ) and the "Ç" (which is not used in Spanish, but is part of sibling languages like French, Portuguese and Catalan) is placed at the rightmost position of the home line, beyond the diacritical dead keys. Norwegian keyboards inserts "Å" to the right of "P", "Ø" to the right of "L", and "Æ" to the right of "Ø", thus not changing the appearance of the rest of the keyboard. The Danish layout is like the Norwegian, only switching "Æ" and "Ø", and Swedish has their umlaut letters "Ä" and "Ö" in those places. Some keyboards for Lithuanian used a layout known as ĄŽERTY, where "Ą" appears in place of "Q" above "A", Ž in place of "W" above "S", with "Q" and "W" being available either on the far right-hand side or by use of the Alt Gr key.

Alternative keyboard layouts

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Because modern keyboards do not suffer from the problems of older mechanical keyboards, the QWERTY layout's separation of frequently used letter pairs is no longer strictly necessary. Several alternative keyboard layouts, such as Dvorak Simplified Keyboard arrangement (designed by Drs. August Dvorak and William Dealey and patented in 1936), have been designed to increase a typist's speed and comfort, largely by moving the most common letters to the home row and maximizing hand alternation. The effectiveness of these layouts is disputed. Some studies ^* have shown that alternative methods are more efficient, but Dvorak and other alternative typists most often cite comfort as the greatest advantage. QWERTY's inventor, Christopher Scholes, patented a key arrangement similar to Dvorak's, but it never became popular.

Some researchers, such as economists Stan Liebowitz at the University of Texas at Dallas, Texas, and Stephen E. Margolis of North Carolina State University, claim that QWERTY is really no less efficient than other layouts. Opponents point out that August Dvorak stood to gain from the success of his layout, and that he may have perpetuated his "efficiency myth" to increase his financial gains. Other QWERTY advocates claim that for a QWERTY typist to switch to Dvorak or another layout requires more effort than initially learning to touch-type, because of having to retrain the fingers' muscle memory. Computer users also need to unlearn the habit of pressing key shortcuts (for example: Ctrl-C for copy, Ctrl-X for cut, Ctrl-V for paste, on Microsoft Windows), though some programs and operating systems allow the use of alternate layouts combined with QWERTY shortcuts.

Opponents of alternative keyboard designs most often point to QWERTY's ubiquity as a deciding factor, because the costs incurred by using the supposedly inefficient layout are much less than those of retraining typists. It is not unusual to find Dvorak typists who also touch-type the QWERTY layout for convenience, since QWERTY dominates the keyboard market. The tension between the Dvorak efficiency and the QWERTY ubiquity illustrates the problem of collective switching costs, assuming QWERTY's relative inefficiency.

Besides the Dvorak layout, there are many other newer alternative keyboard layouts, but those layouts have not gained widespread use.

Trivia

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• The longest common English word that can be typed using only the left hand (using conventional hand placement) is stewardesses. The words sweaterdresses and aftercataracts are longer and can also be typed with only the left hand, but they are not in all dictionaries.
• The longest English word that can be typed with the right hand only (using conventional hand placement) is johnny-jump-up, or alternatively polyphony.
• The word typewriter can be typed entirely using the top row of the QWERTY keyboard; it has been speculated that this may have been a factor in the choice of keys for ease of demonstration, although this is unlikely.
• Long English words that can be typed with the keys of one row only include typewriter and rupturewort.
• The average person is expected to type 30-40 words per minute using the touch typing technique on a QWERTY keyboard. 40-50 words per minute is considered excellent, and some have been clocked at over 90 words per minute.
• In the video series Veggie Tales the computer used to look up Bible verses is named Qwerty.

See also

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• Keyboard layout
• Dvorak Simplified Keyboard
• Colemak
• Ergonomics
• Fitts' law
• Path dependence
• Blickensderfer typewriter
• ASDF (sequence of letters)
• WASD
• Typing

External links

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• Article on QWERTY and Path Dependence from EH.NET's Encyclopedia
• Dvorak vs QWERTY Tool A tool to compare the efficiency of Dvorak, QWERTY and Colemak
• The Curse of Qwerty by Jared Diamond.
• The Fable of the Keys Refutes The Curse of Qwerty
  • Article disputing the validity of The Fable of the Keys
• The QWERTY myth
• The QWERTY Connection, historical information
• Introducing the Dvorak Keyboard
• A study on the theoretical efficiency of keyboard layouts
• Typewriter Words
• "Why QWERTY was Invented"
• Ergonomics review of alternative keyboards
• Where Once was a Comma Designer Artemy Lebedev's take on keyboard layout and the history of QWERTY

Keyboard layouts | Computer keyboards | Typewriters

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