Where does our keyboard layout come from?

09 October 2025

Many people who learn to touch type or use two fingers to feel their way around their computer keyboard or smartphone keypad will at some point ask, “why QWERTY, of all things?” Where does this seemingly arbitrary key arrangement come from? The answer lies in the early days of manual typewriters.

Anyone who has ever pressed all the keys on a mechanical typewriter keyboard down at once will know what happens: the little hammers that press the letters onto the ribbon end up in a tangled mass. With the first typewriters, this would often happen even if the devices were being operated as intended, i.e. with one key being pressed after the other. This is because, on the early devices, the letters were usually arranged alphabetically.

And the same was also true of the typewriter for which Christopher Latham Sholes was granted a patent in 1868. The typewriter which the journalist and book printer came up with was not exactly a sales hit at first. So, Sholes had his device tested in practice by stenographers. Based on feedback from professional speed typists, he made progressively bigger changes to the keyboard arrangement – finally ending up with QWERTY.

The principle according to which Sholes arranged what looked like a senseless jumble of letters was that of the greatest possible distance. He placed the keys involved in frequently used letter combinations far apart. This meant that the hammers could no longer touch each other so readily, allowing the user to type faster.

Gun and sewing machine manufacturer Remington started mass producing the machine in 1874. The breakthrough came in 1878 with the Remington 2: as well as using the QWERTY keyboard, this typewriter also made it possible for the first time to switch between upper- and lower-case letters using the shift key.

In the years and decades to come, QWERTY became the keyboard standard in the English-speaking world – and was adapted to suit the frequencies with which various letters occurred in other countries. In France and Belgium, the AZERTY keyboard was adopted at the beginning of the 20th century. In German-speaking countries, but also in Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia and in other countries under the sway of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, QWERTZ was used instead.

The main reason for this small change to the English QWERTY layout was that the letter Y was much rarer in German than in English, which accounted for its relocation to the lower left-hand corner of the keyboard. In return, the letter Z was promoted from the margins to the heart of the keyboard. After all, Z occurs much more frequently in German than in English.

The unstoppable rise of the computer from the end of the 1970s has in fact rendered QWERTY obsolete in terms of its original purpose. After all, there are no more mechanical hammers to get tangled up with each other. There have in fact been numerous attempts to reform Sholes’ arrangement, which continue to this day. After all, in terms of ease of use and writing flow, it leaves a great deal to be desired. Way back in 1932, a commission led by the psychologist August Dvorak developed an ergonomically optimised keyboard layout: the commonest letters were moved to the middle, i.e. where our fingers habitually rest, and the rarer ones were relegated to the bottom row. Letter combinations were allocated to different fingers or even to both hands to make the typing rhythm as fluid as possible.

This all made perfect logical sense – but it didn’t catch on, any more than the Colemak keyboard layout developed in 2006, which was more closely aligned with QWERTY to enable a faster and easier switch. When confronted with the power of habit, none of the alternatives stood a chance. From a sociological point of view, this is a clear case of path dependence: the more universally a practice is established among manufacturers and users, the more stubbornly it persists, even in the face of the emergence of technologically superior alternatives.

So, QWERTY remains the undisputed king of all keyboard arrangements to this day. But if you want to take a stand against the power of habit and make a clean break with path dependence, you can change the keyboard layout to Dvorak or Colemak on Android or iOS operating systems and on Windows or Apple computers. Doing so will allow you to find out for yourself whether you might be able to type better and more fluently than you can with QWERTY.