Srcmabled Txet

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.
Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but The wrod as a wlohe.

Amzanig huh?

Music: Paul Desmond :: Msuic For A Wlhie

11 Replies to “Srcmabled Txet”

  1. Worth noting that for words up to five or six letters in length the number of possible misspellings isn’t all that large, and almost all of the misspellings (viewed as permutations of the correct spelling) have ‘fixed points’ that make the words somewhat easier to decipher.

  2. I wish someone would code up something like a (non-seamless, EOLAS-approved) plug-in for movable type et al. that converts blog entries to this kind of text.

    I spopsue it’s olny a mtater of tmie tuhogh.

  3. It’s no surprise that context is everything, but I think the example is interesting because we spend our lives learning to be good spellers, and it turns out not to matter.

    As for you having seen it before…. well, that’s my style I suppose. Late to the table as a way of life. Sorry for the redundancy.

  4. “we spend our lives learning to be good spellers, and it turns out not to matter”

    Tell that to your Perl interpreter!

    Anyway, spelling still does matter, because longer words aren’t as parseable when their letters are mixed up. Plus, spelling is one of those fundamentals — like musical scales — that’s a building block of language. Doesn’t “matter” on its own terms, as such, but it’s essential for mastery, esp in a language like English so full of homophononymosynograms (e.g. “hear/here”). Furthermore, there must be syntax-space collisions where a word becomes a different word when mixed up, and spelling matters there, too. I’m too lazy to think of examples.

  5. >As for you having seen it before…. well, that’s my style I suppose. Late to the table as a way of life. Sorry for the redundancy.

    I don’t come here for up-to-the-minue news (that’s what the wires are for). I come here for good crac (as the Irish would say.)

    As for the Advertiser story… seems kind of redundant to me — nothing new there other than some novel, inconsequential quotes.

    ;c)

  6. Chris, I know you don’t *really* think that I don’t think spelling matters…

    OK, another tack: We all know context is everything, but this is one of the coolest real-world examples of it I’ve seen. Usually “context” is an abstract tossed around, seldom proved so concretely.

  7. I wonder if this “discovery” could help aid people in achieving “speed” reading. I’m normally a pretty slow reader — I pluncker along word-per-word. Knowing that I really only (need) to process the first and last letter of a word could I, and people like me, speed things along?

    If so, I really could have used tht knowledge in college…

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