For centuries, the mechanisms used to play instruments like church organs across Europe were known only as manuals (a word in use from the start of the fifteenth century, meaning something operated by hand—from the Latin manualis, meaning “of the hand”).
Then, around 1820, a new term arrived on the scene: the keyboard. A more literally descriptive term than manual, within a few decades its usage had begun to be extended to other machinery—and when the world’s first commercial typewriter was put on sale in 1870, keyboard became the preferred term for describing the layout of its letters.
It wasn’t until the success of a typewriter model released by American manufacturers Remington in 1878 (the inventively named Remington No. 2, their second typewriter model), however, that the most famous keyboard layout in the modern world made its way into the mainstream: the QWERTY arrangement.
QWERTY—named after the first six letters on the keyboard, reading from the top left—was designed specifically to allow users to type fast in English without jamming the metal arms on which letters were mounted, something that tended to happen when adjacent letters were repeatedly used. The QWERTY layout thus ensures that most common letter combinations within English words are split across the keyboard. Similarly, the diagonal arrangement of the letters—which are offset beneath one another, rather than appearing in a straightforward grid—was designed to make clashes between levers less likely.
In modified form, QWERTY remains the standard for most keyboards using the Roman alphabet around the world today. Even though mechanical levers have long vanished from the process of typing, there can be few computer-users alive today for whom the letter arrangement QWERTYUIOP isn’t instantly familiar.
QWERTY’s dominance comes partly thanks to historical momentum, but it does have at least one serious rival, albeit with a far smaller pool of users. This is the Dvorak keyboard layout—named not after its particular arrangement of letters, but in honor of its coinventor, Dr. August Dvorak, who together with his brother patented his brainchild in 1936.
Dvorak’s keyboard—known properly as the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (DSK)—was based on the principle of attempting to reduce to a minimum the distance traveled by someone’s fingers when typing in English. With a top row of letters beginning with punctuation before reading PYFGCRL, to most computer users’ eyes it looks jarringly alien compared to the QWERTY approach, although its exponents argue that it can both increase typing speed and reduce errors.
In any case, if you wish to try it for yourself, most modern computers include the option to switch from QWERTY to Dvorak—while some keyboards will even let you remove their letters and numbers and replace them wherever you see fit (although you’ll also need to reconfigure your computer if this isn’t utterly to bewilder anyone using it after you).