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QWERTY
QWERTY (/ˈkwɜːrti/ KWUR-tee) 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: QWERTY. 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 2025. 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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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QWERTY
QWERTY (/ˈkwɜːrti/ KWUR-tee) 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: QWERTY. 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 2025. 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.
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:
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:
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:
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.