Reading Fact I Didn't Know

I didn't know this until Corinne forwarded it to me. Interesting that you can't really question whether or not it's true, since it proves itself.

Aoccdrnig to rareasch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is that the frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

Very nifty.

I have a family member who writes a little like that. ;-)

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RE: Reading Fact I Didn't Know

Do you have a URL?

In school, in Type class they taught us that humans read word shapes more then we read letters and that your switching around of the letters would greatly depend on whether you maintained the outline of word for it to be more or less successful.

just curious, stuff like this is fascinating.

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Re: Reading Fact I Didn't Know

> >would greatly depend on whether you maintained the > >outline of word for it to be more or less successful. > > I hvae a sprict that glbreas wdors this way, wothuit wrnryoig aoubt wrod shpae. Seems to work OK, but hand-crafted garbling seems to be more readable, so what you've said about word shape makes sense to me.

The garbling of 'script' into 'sprict' was the only show-stopper in the sentence above. 'garbles' only made sense because of the context. So there may well be some truth to the 'shape' of the letterform (glyphs) being an important factor.

These sorts of issues also come up when doing things like handwriting recognition. We had a devil of a time with this when doing Newton development. One wrong shape in the stream of letters and the word-matching would get screwed up. Later recog engines did more of a 'whole word' approach. Still, it's a tough nut.

-Bill Kearney

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