The QWERTY design is based on a layout included on theSholes and Glidden typewriter sold byE. 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 ade facto standard on computers, as of 2026. Two prominent alternatives,Dvorak andColemak, have been developed. In Europe, two types of modified layouts,QWERTZ andAZERTY, are used predominantly forGerman andFrench, respectively.
The first model constructed by Sholes used a piano-like keyboard with two rows of characters arranged alphabetically as shown below:[1]
- 3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z2 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 ofbigram (letter-pair) frequency by educator Amos Densmore, brother of the financial backerJames Densmore, was believed to have influenced the array of letters.[2] Others consider this conjecture to be unfounded, suggesting instead that the letter groupings evolved fromAmerican Morsetelegraph operators' feedback (noting the adjacency of⟨e⟩ and⟨r⟩, a very common pairing in English).[3][4]: 163 : 170
In November 1868 he changed the arrangement of the latter half of the alphabet, N to Z, right-to-left.[5]: 12–20 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:[5]: 24–25
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 -A E I . ? Y U O ,B C D F G H J K L MZ 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 toE. Remington and Sons. The keyboard layout was finalized within a few months by Remington's mechanics and was ultimately presented:[4]: 161–174
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 - ,Q W E . T Y I U O PZ S D F G H J K L MA 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.[4] Vestiges of the original alphabetical layout remained in the "home row" sequence DFGHJKL.[6]
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 , . /
Remington 2 typewriter, 1878 – First typewriter with a shift key for upper and lower case characters
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[4]: 162 (or even incorrect[3]) 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.[8]
Differences from modern layout
Substituting characters
Christopher Latham Sholes's 1878 QWERTY keyboard layout
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 mostpunctuation marks are in different positions or are missing entirely.[9] 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 letterI (or lowercase letterL) for the digit one, and the uppercaseO for the zero.[10]
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.[11]
In early designs, some characters were produced by printing two symbols with thecarriage in the same position. For instance, theexclamation 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 asé andõ were created by the use ofdead keys for thediacritics (′, ~), which did not move the paper forward. Thus, the′ ande would be printed at the same location on the paper, creatingé.
Contemporaneous alternatives
Crandall 1, 1883
There were no particular technological requirements for the QWERTY layout,[4] 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 includeThomas Edison's 1872 electric print-wheel device which later became the basis forTeletype machines;Lucien Stephen Crandall's typewriter (the second to come onto the American market in 1883) whose type was arranged on a cylindrical sleeve; theHammond typewriter of 1885 which used a semi-circular "type-shuttle" of hardened rubber (later light metal); and theBlickensderfer typewriter of 1893 which used a type wheel. The early Blickensderfer's "Ideal" keyboard was also non-QWERTY, instead having the sequence "DHIATENSOR" in thehome row, these 10 letters being capable of composing 70% of the words in the English language.[12]
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[13] (the three most frequent letters in the English language,ETA, are all typed with the left 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,[4]: 162 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.[14] (On the other hand, in the German keyboard theZ has been moved between theT and theU to help type the frequent digraphs TZ and ZU in that language.) Almost every word in the English language contains at least one vowel letter, but on the QWERTY keyboard only the vowel letterA 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 theKinesis orTypeMatrix, retain the QWERTY layout but arrange the keys in vertical columns, to reduce unnecessary lateral finger motion.[15][16]
The first computer terminals such as the Teletype were typewriters that could produce and be controlled by computer codes. These used the QWERTY layouts but added keys such asescapeEsc, addedASCII punctuation like less-than and greater-than signs, and often moved the shift combinations for punctuation to simplify the electronics. Later keyboards copied punctuation arrangements from the IBM Selectric and other typewriters.[17]
Diacritical marks
QWERTY was designed forEnglish, a language without accents ('diacritics') except for a few words of foreign origin. The standard US keyboard has no provision for accents at all; the need was later met by the so-called "US-International"keyboard mapping, which uses a "dead key" technique to type accents without having to add more physical keys. (The same principle is used in the standard US keyboard layout formacOS, but in a different way). Most European (including UK) keyboards for PCs have anAltGr key ('Alternative Graphics' key,[a] replaces the right Alt key) that enables easy access to the most common diacritics used in the territory where sold. For example, default keyboard mapping for the UK/Ireland keyboard has the diacritics used inIrish but these are rarely printed on the keys; but to type the accents used inWelsh andScots Gaelic requires the use of a "UK Extended" keyboard mapping and the dead key orcompose key method. This arrangement applies to Windows,ChromeOS andLinux; macOS computers have different techniques. The US International and UK Extended mappings provide many of the diacritics needed for students of other European languages.
Some QWERTY keyboards havealt codes, in which holdingAlt while inputting a sequence of numbers on a numeric keypad allows the entry of special characters. For example,Alt+163 results in ú (a Latin lowercase letter u with an acute accent).
Specific language variants
There are a large number of QWERTY keyboard variants for languages written in the Latin script, with some keys assigned to best facilitate the orthographies of those languages. These are detailed in another article, thelist of QWERTY keyboard language variants.
Minor changes to the arrangement are made for other languages. There are a large number of different keyboard layouts used for different languages written in Latin script. They can be divided into three main families according to where theQ,A,Z,M, andY keys are placed on the keyboard. These are usually named after the first six letters, for example this QWERTY layout and theAZERTY layout.
Multilingual variants
It has been suggested that this section besplit out into another article. (Discuss)(October 2021)
Multilingual keyboard layouts, unlike the default layouts supplied for one language and market, try to make it possible for the user to type in any of several languages using the same number of keys. Mostly this is done by adding a further virtual layer in addition to the⇧ Shift-key by means ofAltGr (or 'rightAlt' reused as such), which contains a further repertoire of symbols and diacritics used by the desired languages.
This section also tries to arrange the layouts in ascending order by the number of possible languages and not chronologically according to the Latin alphabet as usual.
United Kingdom (Extended) Layout
United Kingdom Extended Keyboard Layout for WindowsUnited Kingdom Extended Keyboard Layout for LinuxUnited Kingdom International Keyboard Layout for Linux
Windows
FromWindows XP SP2 onwards, Microsoft has included a variant of the British QWERTY keyboard (the "United Kingdom Extended" keyboard layout) that can additionally generate severaldiacritical marks. This supports input on a standard physical UK keyboard for many languages without changing positions of frequently used keys, which is useful when working with text inWelsh,Scots Gaelic and Irish — languages native to parts of the UK (Wales,parts of Scotland andNorthern Ireland respectively).
In this layout, the grave accent key (`¦) becomes, as it also does in the US International layout, adead key modifying the character generated by the next key pressed. The apostrophe, double-quote, tilde and circumflex (caret) keys are not changed, becoming dead keys only when 'shifted' withAltGr. Additionalprecomposed characters are also obtained by shifting the 'normal' key using theAltGr key. The extended keyboard is software installed from the Windowscontrol panel, and the extended characters are not normally engraved on keyboards.
The UK Extended keyboard uses mostly the AltGr key to add diacritics to the letters a, e, i, n, o, u, w and y (the last two being used in Welsh) as appropriate for each character, as well as to their capitals. Pressing the key and then a character that does not take the specific diacritic produces the behaviour of a standard keyboard. The key presses followed by spacebar generate a stand-alone mark.:
grave accents (e.g. à, è, etc.) needed for Scots Gaelic are generated by pressing the grave accent (or 'backtick') key`, which is a dead key, then the letter. Thus`+a produces à.
acute accents (e.g. á) needed for Irish are generated by pressing theAltGr key together with the letter.[b] ThusAltGr+a produces á;AltGr+⇧ Shift+a produces Á.
thecircumflex diacritic needed for Welsh may be added byAltGr+6, acting as a dead key combination, followed by the letter. ThusAltGr+6 thena produces â,AltGr+6 thenw produces the letter ŵ.
Some other languages commonly studied in the UK and Ireland are also supported to some extent:
diaeresis or umlaut (e.g. ä, ë, ö, etc.) is generated by a dead key combinationAltGr+2, then the letter. ThusAltGr+2a produces ä.
tilde (e.g. ã, ñ, õ, etc., as used in Spanish and Portuguese) is generated by dead key combinationAltGr+#, then the letter. ThusAltGr+#a produces ã.
cedilla (e.g. ç) under c is generated byAltGr+C, and the capital letter (Ç) is produced byAltGr+⇧ Shift+C
TheAltGr and letter method used for acutes and cedillas does not work for applications which assign shortcut menu functions to these key combinations.
These combinations are intended to bemnemonic and designed to be easy to remember: the circumflex accent (e.g. â) is similar to the free-standing circumflex (caret) (^), printed above the6 key; the diaeresis/umlaut (e.g. ö) is visually similar to the double-quote (") above2 on the UK keyboard; the tilde (~) is printed on the same key as the#.
The UK Extended layout is almost entirely transparent to users familiar with the UK layout. A machine with the extended layout behaves exactly as with the standard UK, except for the rarely used grave accent key. This makes this layout suitable for a machine for shared or public use by a user population in which some use the extended functions.
Despite being created for multilingual users, UK-Extended in Windows does have some gaps — there are many languages that it cannot cope with, including Romanian and Turkish, and all languages with differentcharacter sets, such as Greek and Russian. It also does not cater forthorn (þ, Þ) inOld English, the ß in German, the œ in French, nor for the å, æ, ø, ð, þ in Nordic languages.
ChromeOS
The UK-Extended "input method" inChrome OS provides all the same combinations as with Windows, but adds many more symbols and dead keys viaAltGr.
¬¦ `◌
!¡ 1¹
"½ 2◌
£⅓ 3⅓
$¼ 4€
%⅜ 5½
^⅝ 6◌
&⅞ 7{
*™ 8[
(± 9]
)° 0}
_¿ -\
+◌ =◌
tab
QΩ q@
WẂ wẃ
EÉ eé
R® r¶
TŦ tŧ
YÝ yý
UÚ uú
IÍ ií
OÓ oó
PÞ pþ
{◌ [◌
}◌ ]◌
🔍
AÁ aá
S§ sß
DÐ dð
Fª fđ
GŊ gŋ
HĦ hħ
J◌ j◌
K& kĸ
LŁ lł
:◌ ;◌
@◌ '◌
~◌ #◌
shift
|¦ \|
Z< z«
X> x»
CÇ cç
V‘ v“
B’ b”
NN nn
Mº mµ
<× ,─
>÷ .·
?◌ /◌
shift
Notes:
Dotted circle (◌) is used here to indicate a dead key.
As of March 2025[update], the combinationsAltGr+⇧ Shift+2 andAltGr+5 both produce a1⁄2 symbol: there is no key for² (U+00B2²SUPERSCRIPT TWO, "squared sign").
Thediacritics used in the United Kingdom's native languages (English, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Irish[c] ) are provided by using deadkey combinations below.
Finally, any arbitrarygrapheme can be produced given its Unicodecode point:ctrl+⇧ Shift+u, release, then the hexadecimal value, thenspace bar or↩ Return. For examplectrl+⇧ Shift+u (release)1234space produces theEthiopic syllable SEE, ሴ.̣̣̣̣
US-International
US-International keyboard layout (Windows)
Windows provides an alternative layout for a US keyboard to type diacritics, called the US-International layout. Linux andChromeOS (which calls it the International/Extended keyboard[citation needed]) also provide this layout with slight modifications such as many moreAltGr combinations.
The layout is installed from the settings panel.[18] The additional functions (shown in blue) may or may not be engraved on the keyboard, but are always functional. It can be used to type most major languages from Western Europe:Afrikaans,Danish,Dutch,English,Faroese,Finnish,German,Icelandic,Irish,Italian,Norwegian,Portuguese,Scots Gaelic,Spanish, andSwedish. It is not sufficient forFrench because it lacks the grapheme “œ/Œ” (as does every keyboard layout provided by Windows except theCanadian multilingual standard keyboard). Some less common western and central European languages (such asWelsh,Maltese,Czech andHungarian), are not fully supported. If the keyboard does not have anAltGr key, the right-handAlt is used. If that key does not exist (which is true of many laptops) the combinationCtrl+Alt works as well.
This layout uses keys',`,",^ and~ asdead keys to generate characters with diacritics by pressing the appropriate key, then the letter on the keyboard. Only certain letters such as vowels and "n", work, otherwise the symbol is produced followed by the typed letter. To get only the symbol ', `, ", ^ and ~, press theSpacebar after the key.
^ + vowel → vowel with circumflex accent, e.g.,^+e → ê
~ +a,n oro → letter with tilde, e.g.~+n → ñ,~+o → õ
' +c → ç (Windows) or ć (X11)
The layout is not entirely transparent to users familiar with the conventional US layout as the dead keys act different (they don't appear immediately and produce accented letters depending on what letter is typed next). This could be disconcerting on a machine for shared or public use. There are alternatives, such as requiringAltGr to be held down to get the dead-key function.
US-International in the Netherlands
Closeup of Dutch laptop keyboard with an engraved euro sign€
TheDutch layout is historical, and keyboards with this layout are rarely used. Instead, the standard keyboard layout in theNetherlands is US-International, as theDutch language heavilyrelies on diacritics and the US-International keyboard provides easy access to diacritics usingdead keys. While many US keyboards do not haveAltGr or extra US-International characters engraved on them, Dutch keyboards typically have theAltGr engraved at the location of the rightAlt key, and have theeuro sign€ engraved next to the5 key.
Apple International English Keyboard
International English version of Apple keyboard
There are three kinds ofApple Keyboards for English: theUnited States, theUnited Kingdom and International English. The International English version features the same changes as the United Kingdom version, only without substituting# for the£ symbol on⇧ Shift+3, and as well lacking visual indication for the€ symbol on⌥ Option+2 (although this shortcut is present with all Apple QWERTY layouts).
Differences from the US layout are:
The~ ` key is located on the left of theZ key, and the| \ key is located on the right of the" ' key.
The Canadian Multilingual Standard keyboard layout is used by some Canadians. Though thecaret (^) is missing, it is easily inserted by typing the circumflex accent followed by a space.
The visual layout used inFinland is basically the same as theSwedish layout. This is practical, asFinnish andSwedish share the special charactersÄ/ä andÖ/ö, and while the SwedishÅ/å is unnecessary for writing Finnish, it is needed bySwedish-speaking Finns and to write Swedish family names which are common.
As of 2008, there is a new standard for the Finnish multilingual keyboard layout, developed as part of alocalization project byCSC. All the engravings of the traditional Finnish–Swedish visual layout have been retained, so there is no need to change the hardware, but the functionality has been extended considerably, as additional characters (e.g.,Æ/æ,Ə/ə,Ʒ/ʒ) are available through theAltGr key, as well asdead keys, which allow typing a wide variety of letters withdiacritics (e.g.,Ç/ç,Ǥ/ǥ,Ǯ/ǯ).[19][20]
Based on theLatin letter repertory included in the Multilingual European Subset No. 2 (MES-2) of the Unicode standard, the layout has three main objectives. First, it provides for easy entering of text in both Finnish and Swedish, the two officiallanguages of Finland, using the familiar keyboard layout but adding some advanced punctuation options, such asdashes, typographicalquotation marks, and thenon-breaking space (NBSP).
As a third objective, it allows for relatively easy entering of particularly names (of persons, places or products) in a variety of European languages using a more or less extended Latin alphabet, such as the officiallanguages of the European Union (excludingBulgarian andGreek). Some letters, likeŁ/ł needed for Slavic languages, are accessed by a special "overstrike" key combination acting like a dead key.[21]Initially theRomanian lettersȘ/ș andȚ/ț (S/s and T/t withcomma below) were not supported (the presumption was thatŞ/ş andŢ/ţ (withcedilla) would suffice as surrogates), however the layout was updated in 2019 to include the letters with the commas as well.[22]
EurKEY, amultilingual keyboard layout intended for Europeans, programmers and translators which uses the US-standard QWERTY layout as base and adds a third and fourth layer available through theAltGr key andAltGr+⇧ Shift. These additional layers provide support for manyWestern European languages, special characters, the Greek alphabet (viadead keys), and many common mathematical symbols.
Unlike most of the other QWERTY layouts, which are formal standards for a country or region, EurKEY is not an EU, EFTA or any national standard.
To address the ergonomics issue of QWERTY,EurKEY Colemak-DH was also developed as aColmak-DH version with the EurKEY design principles.
Several alternatives to QWERTY have been developed over the years, claimed by their designers and users to be more efficient, intuitive, and ergonomic. Nevertheless, none have seen widespread adoption, partly due to the sheer dominance of available keyboards and training.[23] Although some studies have suggested that some of these may allow for faster typing speeds,[24] many other studies have failed to do so, and many of the studies claiming improved typing speeds were severely methodologically flawed or deliberately biased, such as the studies administered byAugust Dvorak himself before and afterWorld War II.[citation needed] Economists Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis have noted that rigorous studies are inconclusive as to whether they actually offer any real benefits,[25] and some studies on keyboard layout have suggested that, for a skilled typist, layout is largely irrelevant – even randomized and alphabetical keyboards allow for similar typing speeds to QWERTY and Dvorak keyboards – and thatswitching costs always outweigh the benefits of further training with a keyboard layout a person has already learned.[citation needed]
The most widely used such alternative is theDvorak keyboard layout; another alternative isColemak, which is based partly on QWERTY and is claimed to be easier for an existing QWERTY typist to learn while offering several supposed optimisations.[26] Most modern computer operating systems support these and other alternative mappings with appropriate special mode settings, with some modern operating systems allowing the user to map their keyboard in any way they like, but few keyboards are made with keys labeled according to any other standard.
Comparisons have been made between Dvorak, Colemak, QWERTY, and other keyboard input systems, namelystenotype or its electronic implementations. However,stenotype is a fundamentally different system, which relies onphonetics and simultaneous key presses orchords. AlthoughShorthand (or 'stenography') has long been known as a faster and more accurate typing system,[citation needed] adoption has been limited, possibly due to the historically high cost of equipment, steeper initial learning curve, and low awareness of the benefits within primary education and in the general public.[citation needed]
The first typed shorthand machines appeared around 1830, with English versions gaining popularity in the early 1900s.[citation needed] Modern electronicstenotype machines or programs produce output in written language,[citation needed] which provides an experience similar to other keyboard setups that immediately produce legible work.
Half QWERTY
TheBlackBerry Pearl (2006) andNokia E55 (2009) are examples of devices that use a half or semi QWERTY keyboard
A half QWERTY keyboard is a combination of an alpha-numeric keypad and a QWERTY keypad, designed formobile phones.[27] In a half QWERTY keyboard, two characters share the same key, which reduces the number of keys and increases thesurface area of each key, useful for mobile phones that have little space for keys.[27] It means that 'Q' and 'W' share the same key and the user must press the key once to type 'Q' and twice to type 'W'.
^Where this key is not provided, some layouts provide its equivalent usingCtrl+Alt+the letter to be accented, which can mean somechords that require additional manual dexterity. Other keyboard mappings convert the rightAlt key to be an AltGr key, despite its engraving.
^The sequenceAltGr+' – acting as a dead key combination – followed by the letter, has the same effect. This inconvenient facility is rarely used, being needed only for use with programs that use the combination ofAltGr and a letter (orCtrl+Alt and letter) for other functions, in which case theAltGr+' method must be used to generate acute accents.
^The acute accent in Irish is additionally provided using AltGr+vowel.
^David, P. A. (1986). "Understanding the Economics of QWERTY: the Necessity of History". In Parker, William N.,Economic History and the Modern Economist. Basil Blackwell, New York and Oxford.
^US 207559, Sholes, Christopher Latham, issued 27 August 1878
^Diamond, Jared (April 1997),"The Curse of QWERTY",Discover,archived from the original on 20 September 2008, retrieved29 April 2009,More than 3,000 English words utilize QWERTY's left hand alone, and about 300 the right hand alone.
^SFS 5966(keyboard layout), Finnish Standards Association SFS, 3 November 2008,archived from the original on 5 December 2014, retrieved19 April 2015. Finnish-Swedish multilingual keyboard setting.
^Kotoistus (12 December 2006),Uusi näppäinasettelu [Status of the new Keyboard Layout] (in Finnish and English),CSC IT Center for Science, archived fromthe original(presentation page collecting drafts of the Finnish Multilingual Keyboard) on 27 April 2015, retrieved19 April 2015
^Krzywinski, Martin."Colemak – Popular Alternative".Carpalx – keyboard layout optimizer. Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre.Archived from the original on 18 April 2019. Retrieved4 February 2010.
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