QWERTY
QWERTY is a keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets; the name comes from the order of the first six keys on the top letter row of the keyboard:. The design evolved for the quick typing of English on typewriters.
The QWERTY design is based on a layout included on the Sholes and Glidden typewriter sold by E. Remington and Sons from 1874. The layout became popular with the success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878 and remains in widespread use as a de facto standard on computers, as of 2026. Two prominent alternatives, Dvorak and Colemak, have been developed. In Europe, two types of modified layouts, QWERTZ and AZERTY, are used predominantly for German and French, respectively.
History
The QWERTY layout was devised and created in the early 1870s by Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer who lived in Kenosha, 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. Soulé.The first model constructed by Sholes used a piano-like keyboard with two rows of characters arranged alphabetically as shown below:
- 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
Sholes struggled for the next five years to perfect his invention, making many trial-and-error rearrangements of the original machine's alphabetical key arrangement. The study of bigram frequency by educator Amos Densmore, brother of the financial backer James Densmore, was believed to have influenced the array of letters. Others consider this conjecture to be unfounded, suggesting instead that the letter groupings evolved from American Morse telegraph operators' feedback.
In November 1868 he changed the arrangement of the latter half of the alphabet, N to Z, right-to-left. In April 1870 he arrived at a four-row, upper case keyboard approaching the modern QWERTY standard, moving six vowel letters, A, E, I, O, U, and Y, to the upper row as follows:
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 -
A E I. ? Y U O,
B C D F G H J K L M
Z X W V T S R Q P N
In 1873, Sholes's backer, James Densmore, successfully sold the manufacturing rights 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 ultimately presented:
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 -,
Q W E. T Y I U O P
Z S D F G H J K L M
A X & C V B N ? ; R
After they purchased the device, Remington made several adjustments, creating a keyboard with essentially the modern QWERTY layout. These adjustments included placing the "R" key in the place previously allotted to the period key. Supposedly, this change was made to let salesmen impress customers by pecking out the brand name "TYPE WRITER QUOTE" from one keyboard row, but this is not formally substantiated. Vestiges of the original alphabetical layout remained in the "home row" sequence DFGHJKL.
The modern ANSI layout is:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - =
Q W E R T Y U I O P \
A S D F G H J K L ; '
Z X C V B N M,. /
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 key.
One popular but possibly invented explanation for the QWERTY arrangement is that it was designed to reduce the likelihood of internal clashing of typebars by placing commonly used combinations of letters farther from each other inside the machine.
Differences from modern layout
Substituting characters
The QWERTY layout depicted in Sholes's 1878 patent is slightly different from the 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 counterparts. 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 missing entirely. 0 and 1 were omitted to simplify the design and reduce the manufacturing and maintenance costs; they were chosen specifically because they were "redundant" and could be recreated using other keys. Typists who learned on these machines learned the habit of using the uppercase letter I for the digit one, and the uppercase O for the zero.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 typewriter keyboards into the 1970s.
Combined characters
In early designs, some characters were produced by printing two symbols with the carriage in the same position. For instance, the exclamation point, which shares a key with the numeral 1 on post-mechanical keyboards, could be reproduced by using a three-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, a more professional approach was to block the carriage by pressing and holding the space bar while printing all characters that needed to be in a shared position. To make this possible, the carriage was designed to advance only after releasing the space bar.In the era of mechanical typewriters, combined characters such as é and õ were created by the use of dead keys for the diacritics, which did not move the paper forward. Thus, the ′ and e would be printed at the same location on the paper, creating é.
Contemporaneous alternatives
There were no particular technological requirements for the QWERTY layout, since at the time there were ways to make a typewriter without the "up-stroke" typebar mechanism that had required it to be devised. Not only were there rival machines with "down-stroke" and "front stroke" 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 whose type was arranged on a cylindrical sleeve; the Hammond typewriter of 1885 which used a semi-circular "type-shuttle" of hardened rubber ; and the Blickensderfer typewriter of 1893 which used a type wheel. The early Blickensderfer's "Ideal" keyboard was also non-QWERTY, instead having the sequence "DHIATENSOR" in the home row, these 10 letters being capable of composing 70% of the words in the English language.Properties
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, making the process faster and more efficient. In the QWERTY layout many more words can be spelled using only the left hand than the right hand. Thousands of English words can be spelled using only the left hand, while only a couple of hundred words can be typed using only the right hand. In addition, more typing strokes are done with the left hand in the QWERTY layout. This is helpful for left-handed people but disadvantageous for right-handed people.Contrary to popular belief, the QWERTY layout was not designed to slow the typist down, but rather to speed up typing. Indeed, there is evidence that, aside from the issue of jamming, placing often-used keys farther apart increases typing speed, because it encourages alternation between the hands. Almost every word in the English language contains at least one vowel letter, but on the QWERTY keyboard only the vowel letter is on the home row, which requires the typist's fingers to leave the home row for most words.
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 because 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 in most electronic keyboards. Some keyboards, such as the Kinesis or TypeMatrix, retain the QWERTY layout but arrange the keys in vertical columns, to reduce unnecessary lateral finger motion.