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QWERTY

Keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets

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QWERTY keyboard, on 2007 Sony Vaio laptop computer.
MichaelMaggs · CC BY-SA 3.0

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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 (letter-pair) 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 (noting the adjacency of ⟨e⟩ and ⟨r⟩, a very common pairing in English).

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 ⇧ Shift key.

One popular but possibly invented (or even incorrect) 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 (or lowercase letter L) 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 (the carriage was heavy and optimized to move in the opposite direction), 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.

Additional character

As can be seen in the associated patent illustration, the original QWERTY keyboard also had, to the left of the A key, a key marked with three (or perhaps four) vertically stacked dots, which produced a symbol consisting of three vertically stacked dots (perhaps a tricolon or a vertical ellipsis), whose intended purpose is not entirely clear.

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 (the second to come onto the American market in 1883) whose type was arranged on a cylindrical sleeve; the Hammond typewriter of 1885 which used a semi-circular "type-shuttle" of hardened rubber (later light metal); 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.

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