QWERTY

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

QWERTY is a keyboard layout for the Latin script. The name comes from reading th
e first six keys appearing on the top left letter row of the keyboard (Q W E R T
Y) from left to right. The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the S
holes and Glidden typewriter and sold to Remington in 1873. It became popular wi
th the success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878, and remains in use on electronic
keyboards due to inertia, the difficulty of learning a layout that differs from
the currently entrenched standard, the network effect of a standard layout, and
the claim by some that alternatives fail to provide very significant advantages.
[1]
Contents [hide]
1
History and purposes
1.1
Differences from modern layout
1.1.1 Substituting characters
1.1.2 Combined characters
1.2
Contemporary alternatives
2
Properties
3
Computer keyboards
4
Diacritical marks and international variants
4.1
United Kingdom (Extended) Layout
4.2
Other keys and characters
4.3
International variants
4.3.1 Canadian
4.3.1.1 Canadian Multilingual Standard
4.3.1.2 Canadian French
4.3.2 Czech (QWERTY)
4.3.3 Danish
4.3.4 Dutch (Netherlands)
4.3.5 Estonian
4.3.6 Faroese
4.3.7 Finnish multilingual
4.3.8 Icelandic
4.3.9 Irish
4.3.10 Italian
4.3.11 Latvian (QWERTY)
4.3.12 Maltese
4.3.13 Norwegian
4.3.14 Polish
4.3.15 Portuguese
4.3.15.1
Brazil
4.3.15.2
Portugal
4.3.16 Romanian (in Romania and Moldova)
4.3.17 Slovak (QWERTY)
4.3.18 Spanish
4.3.18.1
Spain, a.k.a. Spanish (International sort)
4.3.18.2
Hispanic America
4.3.19 Swedish
4.3.20 Turkish (Q-keyboard)
4.3.21 United Kingdom
4.3.21.1
UK Apple keyboard
4.3.21.2
United Kingdom extended
4.3.22 United States
4.3.22.1
US-International
4.3.22.2
US-International in the Netherlands
4.3.22.3
Apple International English Keyboard
4.3.23 Vietnamese
5
Alternatives to QWERTY
6
Comparison to other keyboard input systems

7
8
9
10
11
History

Half QWERTY
See also
References
Notes
External links
and purposes[edit]

Keys are arranged on diagonal columns, to give space for the levers.
Main article: Sholes and Glidden typewriter
The QWERTY layout was devised and created in the early 1870s by Christopher Lath
am Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer who lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In
October 1867, Sholes filed a patent application for his early writing machine he
developed with the assistance of his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soul.[
2]
The first model constructed by Sholes used a piano-like keyboard with two rows o
f characters arranged alphabetically as follows:[2]
- 3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
2 4 6 8 . A B C D E F G H I J K L M
The construction of the "Type Writer" had two flaws that made the product suscep
tible to jams. Firstly, characters were mounted on metal arms or typebars, which
would clash and jam if neighboring arms were pressed at the same time or in rap
id succession. Secondly, its printing point was located beneath the paper carria
ge, invisible to the operator, a so-called "up-stroke" design. Consequently, jam
s were especially serious, because the typist could only discover the mishap by
raising the carriage to inspect what had been typed. The solution was to place c
ommonly used letter-pairs (like "th" or "st") so that their typebars were not ne
ighboring, avoiding jams.[citation needed] Contrary to popular belief, the QWERT
Y layout was not designed to slow the typist down,[3] but rather to speed up typ
ing by preventing jams. Indeed, there is evidence that, aside from the issue of
jamming, placing often-used keys farther apart increases typing speed, because i
t encourages alternation between the hands.[4] There is another origin story in
the Smithsonian that the qwerty keyboard was made for telegraph operators and ha
s this layout to make it easy for the telegraph operator to work.[4][5][6] (On t
he other hand, in the German keyboard the Z has been moved between the T and the
U to help type the frequent bigraphs TZ and ZU in that language.) Almost every
word in the English language contains at least one vowel letter, but on the QWER
TY keyboard only the vowel letter "A" is located on the home row, which requires
the typist's fingers to leave the home row for most words.
Sholes struggled for the next five years to perfect his invention, making many t
rial-and-error rearrangements of the original machine's alphabetical key arrange
ment. The study of bigram (letter-pair) frequency by educator Amos Densmore, bro
ther of the financial backer James Densmore, is believed to have influenced the
arrangement of letters, but was later called into question.[7] Others suggest in
stead that the letter arrangement evolved from telegraph operators' feedback.[8]
In November 1868 he changed the arrangement of the latter half of the alphabet,
O to Z, right-to-left.[9] In April 1870 he arrived at a four-row, upper case key
board approaching the modern QWERTY standard, moving six vowel letters, A, E, I,
O, U, and Y, to the upper row as follows:[10]
2 3
A
B C D
Z X W

4
E
F
V

5
I
G
T

6
.
H
S

7
?
J
R

8
Y
K
Q

9
U
L
P

O ,
M
N

In 1873 Sholes's backer, James Densmore, successfully sold the manufacturing rig

hts for the Sholes & Glidden Type-Writer to E. Remington and Sons. The keyboard
layout was finalized within a few months by Remington's mechanics and was ultima
tely presented as follows:[11]
2 3 4
Q W E .
Z S D F
A X & C

5
T
G
V

6
Y
H
B

7
I
J
N

8
U
K
?

9
O
L
;

- ,
P
M
R

After they purchased the device, Remington made several adjustments, creating a
keyboard with essentially the modern QWERTY layout. These adjustments included p
lacing the "R" key in the place previously allotted to the period key. Apocrypha
l claims that this change was made to let salesmen impress customers by pecking
out the brand name "TYPE WRITER QUOTE" from one keyboard row are not formally su
bstantiated.[11] Vestiges of the original alphabetical layout remained in the "h
ome row" sequence DFGHJKL.[12]
The modern layout is:
1
Q
A
Z

2
W
S
X

3
E
D
C

4
R
F
V

5
T
G
B

6
Y
H
N

7
U
J
M

8
I
K
,

9
O
L
.

0 - =
P [ ] \
; '
/

The QWERTY layout became popular with the success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878
, the first typewriter to include both upper and lower case letters, using a shi
ft key.
A feature much less commented-on than the order of the keys is that the keys do
not form a rectangular grid, but rather each column slants diagonally. This is b
ecause of the mechanical linkages
each key is attached to a lever, and hence the
offset prevents the levers from running into each other and has been retained i
n most electronic keyboards. Some keyboards, such as the Kinesis or TypeMatrix,
retain the QWERTY layout but arrange the keys in vertical columns, to reduce unn
ecessary lateral finger motion.[13][14]
Differences from modern layout[edit]
Substituting characters[edit]
Latham Sholes's 1878 QWERTY keyboard layout
The QWERTY layout depicted in Sholes's 1878 patent is slightly different from th
e modern layout, most notably in the absence of the numerals 0 and 1, with each
of the remaining numerals shifted one position to the left of their modern count
erparts. The letter M is located at the end of the third row to the right of the
letter L rather than on the fourth row to the right of the N, the letters X and
C are reversed, and most punctuation marks are in different positions or are mi
ssing entirely.[15] 0 and 1 were omitted to simplify the design and reduce the m
anufacturing and maintenance costs; they were chosen specifically because they w
ere "redundant" and could be recreated using other keys. Typists who learned on
these machines learned the habit of using the uppercase letter I (or lowercase l
etter L) for the digit one, and the uppercase O for the zero.[16]
Combined characters[edit]
In early designs, some characters were produced by printing two symbols with the
carriage in the same position. For instance, the exclamation point, which share
s a key with the numeral 1 on modern keyboards, could be reproduced by using a t
hree-stroke combination of an apostrophe, a backspace, and a period. A semicolon
(;) was produced by printing a comma (,) over a colon (:). As the backspace key
is slow in simple mechanical typewriters (the carriage was heavy and optimized
to move in the opposite direction), a more professional approach was to block th

e carriage by pressing and holding the space bar while printing all characters t
hat needed to be in a shared position. To make this possible, the carriage was d
esigned to advance forward only after releasing the space bar.
The 0 key was added and standardized in its modern position early in the history
of the typewriter, but the 1 and exclamation point were left off some typewrite
r keyboards into the 1970s.[17]
Contemporary alternatives[edit]
There was no particular technological requirement for the QWERTY layout[11] sinc
e at the time there were ways to make a typewriter without the "up-stroke" typeb
ar mechanism that had required it to be devised. Not only were there rival machi
nes with "down-stroke" and "frontstroke" positions that gave a visible printing
point, the problem of typebar clashes could be circumvented completely: examples
include Thomas Edison's 1872 electric print-wheel device which later became the
basis for Teletype machines; Lucien Stephen Crandall's typewriter (the second t
o come onto the American market) whose type was arranged on a cylindrical sleeve
; the Hammond typewriter of 1887 which used a semi-circular "type-shuttle" of ha
rdened rubber (later light metal); and the Blickensderfer typewriter of 1893 whi
ch used a type wheel. The early Blickensderfer's "Ideal" keyboard was also non-Q
WERTY, instead having the sequence "DHIATENSOR" in the home row, these 10 letter
s being capable of composing 70% of the words in the English language.[18]
Properties[edit]
Alternating hands while typing is a desirable trait in a keyboard design. While
one hand types a letter, the other hand can prepare to type the next letter, mak
ing the process faster and more efficient. However, when a string of letters is
typed with the same hand, the chances of stuttering[clarification needed] are in
creased and a rhythm can be broken, thus decreasing speed and increasing errors
and fatigue. In the QWERTY layout many more words can be