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Short Sharp Science: A New Scientist blog

QWERTY effect: How typing may shape meaning of words

Jessica Hamzelou, reporter

rexfeatures_585748d.jpg(Image: Lehtikuva OY/Rex Features)

Would you favour a John over a Dexter? Perhaps you'd prefer a pony to a horse? The way we attach positive meanings to words may be down to the way we type.

Kyle Jasmin at University College London, UK, and Daniel Casasanto at the New School for Social Research in New York reckon that, since we've all become familiar with the QWERTY keyboard, we have begun to attach more positive meanings to words made up of letters from the right side of our keyboards.

That's because it's easier to type those letters, regardless of whether you're left- or right-handed, the pair says. If you split a keyboard down the middle, there are fewer letters on the right-hand side, making it easier for your right hand to tap them.

"If [a word] is easy [to type], it tends to lend a positive meaning. If it's harder, it can go the other way," Jasmin explained to Wired magazine.

They tested their theory by asking English-, Dutch- and Spanish-speaking people to emotionally rate over a thousand words. Each time a participant was shown a word, they had to note how positive its meaning was. Participants rated words with more letters from the right side of a keyboard as being more favourable than those composed of letters from the left side.

Because each of the three languages have different sounds attached to the letters, the effect - named "the QWERTY effect" - appears to be independent of how the words sound. It's all down to the letters that make them up, the team suggest.

They say that the QWERTY effect appeared to be especially strong for new words - those developed after the widespread use of the QWERTY keyboard, such as LOL (which stands for "laugh out loud") because "words that are typed but rarely spoken should be particularly susceptible to biases introduced by the keyboard".

Jasmin and Casasanto even saw the same effect in made-up words, such as "ploke" and "pleek". What's more, left-handed people similarly found words made up of letters from the right of the keyboard to be more positive, strengthening the theory that the effect is merely down to the number of letters on each side.

Widespread typing introduces a new mechanism by which semantic changes in language can arise, the pair conclude.

Journal reference: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, DOI: 10.3758/s13423-012-0229-7

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Statistics 101: Correlation does not imply causation.



Go figure.


What a ridiculous piece of so-called research. With no data from the time when most people were familiar with a keyboard for comparison it is utterly meaningless. And, of course, as Joe states, correlation does not imply causation.

They have come up with a vaguely plausible reason why there might be a causal relationship but that is nowhere near good enough.

Why is this being given room in a respectable scientific publication?


Hi, I advise that you look at the literature itself before you criticize the researchers or the conclusions of the study. Both Jasmin and Casasanto are fully aware that their data is correlational, and neither of them imply causation. This is stated in the abstract, and throughout their article.

Please, no blind criticism. Research first.

>>"Since the present data are correlational, establishing the causal relationships underlying the QWERTY effect will require further research." <<



I'm just so full of rage after typing that.


This needs a control group or two - people who do not type and people who do not touch type.

Another interesting thing they could do is see if there is a bias towards the home keys - if it is ease of typing that is causing this then I would expect that these easy to type words would get a positive bias.


This brings a new twist to an old joke: databases are not only hard to understand but, being all left-hand keys, hard to type. Now it seems they're regarded particularly negatively!


what about AZERTY keyboards?


Could it be, that the hemisphere of the brain that controls each hand has an affect on this?


The QWERTY layout was engineered from studies of typing with a mechanical typewriter. The intent was to choose a layout that would prevent two keys that are pressed one close to the other in time, from colliding at the platen. As one physical key is returning to home, it often gets hit with the other key on the way up.

The pc105 keyboards have additional characters for programming and these have mainly been placed for the right hand, for which most people are dexterous.

Do we chose words that are more on the right side of the keyboard, or do we chose words that are from the left side of our brain? Which is it? Or is it both?


Fortunately, after roughly 30 years of using a Qwerty keyboard for computing daily, Im still so bad at typing I have to read teh keyboard constantly, and even when both my hands were effectively crippled, meaning I could only use hunt and press with one finger, double hook style swinging from the shoulders, my typing speed only halved. I have no idea what home keys are, and if I had to iuse them, I would spend most of my time first looking for them, then trying to work out what on earth I was supposed to do with them.

Miind you, I also found out almost 30 years ago, that I drive in the same manner as well. So I never have since my first and only lesson with a relative.

Some of us people with mental disabilities have something preventing us learning certain things. Maybe this also has an effect on how we look and understand things.





It's just as likely the current qwerty layout, anti-key jam design included, evolved over 20 years of experimentation to put the sounds that the testers and inventors liked on the right. Human languages have a sound bias that appears long before the 1800s.

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