Why is the keyboard
QWERTY?

Keyboards are QWERTY because the first commercially successful typewriter was, and everything after copied it. The Sholes & Glidden Type-Writer, manufactured by E. Remington and Sons from 1873 and sold from 1874, used an early version of the layout, and Sholes patented a refined arrangement close to today's in 1878¹. Typists trained on Remingtons, other manufacturers adopted the layout so those typists could use their machines, and the standard locked in.

Sholes, Glidden and Soule patent their first type-writer

1868

The Sholes & Glidden goes on sale

1874

Patent 207,559 shows a near-modern QWERTY

1878

Average typing speed in a 168,000-person study

52 wpm

No. The idea that QWERTY was designed to slow typists is a popular simplification without good evidence. Two better-supported factors shaped it.

The Yasuokas also showed that the layout was not a single designed object: it shifted repeatedly across prototypes in the early 1870s. The often-repeated story that the top row lets salespeople type the word "TYPEWRITER" is a coincidence that has never been documented as a design goal.

A layout that puts common letters under resting fingers clearly exists; whether it makes trained typists much faster is less clear. In 1936 August Dvorak, an educational psychologist, and William Dealey patented the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, which puts all the vowels and the most common consonants on the home row⁴.

Table: QWERTY and Dvorak compared (home-row shares calculated by Science of Apps from standard English letter frequencies)

The evidence for big speed gains is weak. Many early studies showing Dvorak's superiority were run by Dvorak himself. In a much-cited 1990 paper, the economists Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis reviewed the studies, including a 1956 US government experiment that found no meaningful advantage after retraining, and concluded that the case for Dvorak had been overstated³. Their paper answered the economist Paul David, who in 1985 had made QWERTY the textbook example of an inferior standard locked in by history.

Technique and practice matter far more than layout. In 2018, researchers from Aalto University and the University of Cambridge analysed 136 million keystrokes from 168,000 volunteers who took an online typing test⁵. The average speed was about 52 words per minute. The fastest typists differed from slower ones in how they typed, not on what: they pressed the next key before releasing the previous one ("rollover"), made fewer errors and corrections, and used their fingers more consistently. Some fast typists used fewer than ten fingers⁶.

QWERTY survives because the value of a shared standard grew with every person who learned it. Economists call this path dependence and network effects; designers know it as Jakob's law, the expectation that a new thing will work like the familiar ones.

1. Training locked it in — typing schools taught on Remingtons, so employers bought QWERTY machines to hire trained typists.
2. Machines followed people — rival makers adopted QWERTY so trained typists could use their typewriters.
3. Computers inherited it — teletype terminals and then computer keyboards kept the typewriter layout.
4. Phones copied computers — touchscreen keyboards from 2007 kept QWERTY, even without typebars or fingers on a home row.
5. Switching costs kept rising — every new user and device increased the cost of changing, for everyone.

Other languages adapted rather than replaced it: France and Belgium use AZERTY, Germany QWERTZ. For Indian scripts, the Government of India standardised InScript, which places vowels on the left and consonants on the right and uses the same logic across scripts, though many people type Indian languages phonetically on QWERTY.

QWERTY is the strongest evidence in design that a familiar standard beats a better design that requires relearning. If your product asks people to unlearn a habit, the improvement has to be large and the transition gentle.

• Measure the switching cost — count the hours of relearning your change asks of users, not just the gain after.
• Offer both for a while — Windows 8's missing Start button failed; gradual change with an option to keep the old way succeeds more often.
• Improve inside the standard — phone keyboards kept QWERTY but added autocorrect, prediction and swipe typing.
• Don't trust demos by the inventor — like Dvorak's own studies, internal tests of a new design are biased; test with independent users.

If you are planning a redesign that changes how people do something they already know, a mobile app UX audit can estimate where the relearning cost will bite.

Dates and the layout come from Sholes's and Dvorak's patents. The history of the layout's development is from Yasuoka and Yasuoka (2011); the Dvorak evidence review from Liebowitz and Margolis (1990); typing data from the 2018 CHI study by Dhakal and colleagues. The home-row shares are our own calculation using Lewand's English letter frequencies. Photos and layout diagrams are from Wikimedia Commons, credited under each. Last reviewed October 2026.