QWERTY ( ) is the most common modern-day keyboard layout on English-language computer and typewriter keyboards. It takes its name from the first six characters seen in the far left of the keyboard's top first row of letters. The QWERTY design was patented Patent: 207,559 (US) issued August 27, 1878 to Christopher Latham Sholes by Christopher Sholes in 1874 and sold to Remington in the same year, when it first appeared in typewriters.

History and purposes

With the assistance of his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule he built an early writing machine for which a patent application was filed in October 1867. His "Type Writer" had its printing point located beneath the paper carriage, and so was invisible to the operator. Consequently, the tendency of the typebars to clash and jam if struck in rapid succession was a particularly serious problem, in that the mishap would only be discovered when the typist raised the carriage to inspect what had been typed.

Sholes struggled for the next six years to perfect his invention, making many trial-and-error rearrangements of the original machine's alphabetical key arrangement in an effort to reduce the frequency of typebar clashes. Eventually he arrived at a four-row, upper case keyboard approaching the modern QWERTY standard. In 1873 Sholes' backer, James Densmore, succeeded in selling manufacturing rights for the Sholes-Glidden "Type Writer" with E. Remington and Sons and within the following few months the keyboard layout was finalised by Remington's mechanics. Their adjustments included placing the "R" key in the place previously allotted to the period mark, thus enabling salesmen to impress customers by pecking out the brand name "TYPE WRITER" from one keyboard row. Vestiges of the original alphabetical layout remained in the "home row" sequence FGHJKL.

Because of this history, the term QWERTY is sometimes usedFact: date=July 2008 to refer to designs, ideas, or practices that had a historic origin in a technological limitation, became established practice, and have persisted as an anachronism long past the time of their utility.

An unfortunate consequence of the QWERTY layout, for right-handed typists, is that many more words can be spelled using only the left hand. In fact, 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. This is helpful for left-handed people. Many of the keys have changed over the years.