Sunday, December 04, 2005

Typewriter Trivia: Because You Need to Know and I Need to Procrastinate While Studying for Finals

From the Wikipedia definition for QWERTY:

  • The longest common English word that can be typed using only the left hand (using conventional hand placement) is stewardesses. The words sweaterdresses and aftercataracts are longer and can also be typed with only the left hand, but they are not in all dictionaries.

  • The longest English word that can be typed with the right hand only (using conventional hand placement) is johnny-jump-up, or alternatively polyphony.

  • Typewriter is the longest word that can be typed on only one row, which might be no coincidence as some believe that Christopher Sholes deliberately placed all its letters in the top row when designing the layout in order to ease demonstrations. Proprietory, protereotype, and rupturewort are sometimes conjectured as the longest words but these are not available in most dictionaries.

1 comment:

David Amulet said...

Fascinating! I'll add one -- not specific to the typewriter, but relevant. The only word in the English language with three consecutive sets of double letters is "bookkeeper," with its derivatives, of course ...

-- david