键盘字母“乱糟糟”，原来有门道

Why Are the Letters on the Keyboard Not in Alphabetical Order?

Art by Jim Bradshaw

19世纪60年代末，美国发明家克里斯托弗·肖尔斯发明了第一台打字机，当时按键是按字母顺序排列的，那为什么现在的键盘却看上去“乱糟糟”呢？有一种说法认为，肖尔斯设计的机器常会出现卡壳问题，于是他重新排列了按键，但这似乎并不能解释如此大范围的按键变动；另一种说法认为，首批试用肖尔斯打字机的群体是电报员，他们破译电码时需要用打字机把信息快速打出来，但按字母顺序排列的键盘使用起来不方便。肖尔斯很可能根据电报员的使用需求，调整了按键的位置。但这还不是全部推论，键盘的设计还有可能参考了当时的休斯打字电报机上的按键顺序。不管哪种说法是对的，最终的结果都是打字机键盘演变成了如今“QWERTY”的顺序。人们慢慢习惯了这种布局，并沿用至今！

Guess what—today’s computer keyboard comes from a keyboard that did have letters placed alphabetically!

In the late 1860s, an American inventor named Christopher Sholes developed the first typewriter, which had keys in alphabetical order. So why do the letters on today’s keyboard look so random?

According to one theory, pressing the typewriter keys caused Sholes’s machine to jam. So he moved the keys around to keep the machinery from getting stuck. People debate whether this really happened. It’s possible that some keys were moved for this reason, but it’s not the whole story.

Here’s another theory: Some of the first people to try out Sholes’s typewriters were telegraph operators. The telegraph was once commonly used for sending messages. Here’s how an early American telegraph worked: One person would use its big, lever-like key to tap out a message in Morse code. (Morse code uses a series of long and short clicks to represent each letter of the alphabet.) The code would travel as electrical pulses over wires to another telegraph. The operator on that end would then decode and write out the message by hand. This person had to work very fast.

When the typewriter came along, operators could type out a message as they decoded it. But they weren’t fans of the typewriter’s alphabetical keyboard. One reason was that certain letters in Morse code are similar to one another. The operators wanted those letters close together on the keyboard so they could quickly find the right key to press. Sholes likely moved at least some keys based on what worked for the operators.

But that’s not all! The order of keys on another machine called the Hughes Printing Telegraph may have influenced Sholes’s keyboard even more.

Eventually, the keyboard transformed into what’s called “QWERTY” (pronounced KWER-tee—isn’t that fun to say?). It’s named after the first six letters at the top left of the keyboard. Once QWERTY came about, people got used to it . . . and it just stuck around. It became the standard computer keyboard in the United States, and we still use it today!

本文刊登在《英语沙龙》（原版阅读）2025年12月刊