Glossary
Dvorak Simplified Keyboard
The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard is an alternative English keyboard layout that places the most common letters on the home row. Dvorak and Dealey applied for a patent on it in 1932, but the studies that claimed it was faster than QWERTY have been criticized, and the evidence for a speed gain is weak.
Updated October 16, 20264 cited facts, each traced to its source
Also called Dvorak, DSK.
The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, usually called Dvorak, is an alternative letter layout for English. It moves the most common letters onto the home row, the middle row of keys where the fingers rest. Dvorak and Dealey applied for a patent on their layout in 1932 1.
Dvorak puts the vowels and common consonants on the home row
On Dvorak, the home row carries the vowels A, O, E, U and I, along with the consonants D, H, T, N and S. The aim is that most English text is typed without the fingers leaving the middle of the keyboard. QWERTY, by contrast, puts several common letters, such as E, R and T, on the top row.
The early speed claims have not held up well
The strongest claims for Dvorak come from early tests, and later work has questioned them. A 1950s General Services Administration study found that after sufficient training, Dvorak typists matched their previous QWERTY speeds but did not surpass them 2. A summary of the Dvorak evidence says that later investigation showed the Navy experiments were, at best, biased and, at worst, fabricated 3.
Economists also examined the question. In the 1990s, Stan Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis wrote articles in the Journal of Law and Economics 4, arguing against the view that QWERTY's dominance is due to market failure. Their 1990 paper is titled "The Fable of the Keys."
For a typist, the practical result is that switching to Dvorak is a large investment with no clear return. Anyone who wants to test it should time their own results over weeks, not hours, because the first days of retraining are slow for everyone who tries.
What Dvorak means for dictation
Dictation does not use the layout. A speech tool writes the words you say, so the arrangement of the keys does not change how fast a dictated draft appears. Dvorak matters for dictation only when you fix mistakes by keyboard afterwards. The guide to how to type faster covers what actually raises typing speed, and the question on whether Dvorak is faster than QWERTY gives the evidence in more detail.
Related terms
- QWERTY: the standard layout that Dvorak was designed to replace.
- Colemak: a newer alternative that keeps many QWERTY keys in place.
- Home row: the row of keys where the fingers rest.
- Words per minute (WPM): the unit used to compare typing speeds.
Guides that cover it
Evidence
Every number on this page, with where it comes from. Open a fact to see the exact words in its source.
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Related terms
- Typing Speed: Average WPM and How to Type FasterThe topic this term belongs to
- Articulation rateArticulation rate is the number of syllables a speaker produces per second, leaving out pauses. It measures how fast the speech itself comes out, so it is usually faster than the overall speaking rate that counts every pause.
- Characters per minute (CPM)Characters per minute (CPM) is the number of characters typed in one minute, counting spaces and punctuation. Words per minute is the same count divided by five, so a typist at 50 WPM enters 250 characters per minute.
- ColemakColemak is an alternative English keyboard layout, introduced in 2006 and designed for efficient, comfortable touch typing. Its supporters describe it as the third most popular layout for English touch typing, after QWERTY and Dvorak, but that ranking has no stated method.
- Home rowThe home row is the middle row of keys on a keyboard, where the fingers rest when you touch type. On a QWERTY keyboard it holds A, S, D, F for the left hand and J, K, L and semicolon for the right, and every other key is reached by moving a finger away from it and back.
- Hunt and peckHunt and peck is a typing method in which the typist finds each key by sight and presses it with one or two fingers, usually the index fingers. It is also called two-finger typing, and it differs from touch typing, which relies on memorized key positions and the home row.
- Keystroke dynamicsKeystroke dynamics is the identification of a person from the rhythm of their typing, using the timing between key presses as a pattern much like a handwritten signature. It is a behavioral biometric, so it supports identity checks through statistical matching rather than proving who typed.
- Keystrokes per character (KSPC)Keystrokes per character (KSPC) is the average number of keystrokes a text entry method needs to produce one character of text. A basic QWERTY keyboard scores 1, methods that need more presses score above 1, and word prediction can score below 1.
- Keystrokes per hour (KPH)Keystrokes per hour (KPH) is the number of key presses made in one hour. It is the standard unit for numeric data entry, where many jobs require 8,000 or 10,000 keystrokes per hour, and it counts keys rather than words.
- Oral reading fluency (ORF)Oral reading fluency (ORF) measures how many words a reader gets right in one minute of reading a passage aloud. Schools record the result as words correct per minute (WCPM), which subtracts the words read wrongly from the total.
- QWERTYQWERTY is the standard letter arrangement on English keyboards, named for the first six letters of the top row. Christopher Latham Sholes devised it in the early 1870s for typewriters, and it is still the layout most people type on, even though faster layouts have been proposed.
- Rollover typingRollover, or key rollover, is the number of key presses a keyboard can detect when they overlap. Two-key rollover reliably detects only two keys at once, and a matrix keyboard without diodes can register a ghost key when three keys are pressed together.
- StenotypeA stenotype, also called a steno machine, is a chorded keyboard that stenographers use for shorthand, pressing several keys together to produce a syllable or word. The NCRA's court reporter skills test sets a speed of 225 words per minute, and voice writing is a newer method that uses speech recognition instead.