ETAOIN SHRDLU

ETAOIN SHRDLU are the twelve most commonly used letters in the English language. This is slightly different from the frequency of letters in dictionary entries. The entire sequence is

Print set

ETAOIN SHRDLU were the first two vertical rows of keys of the Linotype machine, which had been arranged by letter frequency of the English language. The letters translators have sometimes finger along the row of buttons down to fill a line that already contained a bug with letters. This filling was to correct faster and easier than a faulty line by hand. This line of nonsense was then removed during proofreading. Sometimes these letters also appeared accidentally in the printed product.

This happened at least as likely that the two six successes appeared as word entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, as well as in the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Jokingly, the sequence also like two normal words Etaoin Shrdlu [ ɛt'eɔɪn ' ʃɹd.lu ] is pronounced.

A documentation of the last edition of the New York Times in the lead sentence (2 July 1978) was titled as Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu.

More occurrence

The terms appear in various humorous and fictional environments, they usually indicate that the material to a nonsense sequence. In 1972 SHRDLU by Terry Winograd was used as the name of the first LISP - programmed system of artificial intelligence. In Douglas Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach there is a dialogue between the fictional programmer " Eta Oin " and SHRDLU.

The French version of this twelve - combination, " elaoin sdrétu ", was used as the name of a robot in Petit Noël of the comic artist André Franquin.

In the German -speaking world there is no comparable tradition. The German equivalent would ENISRA TDHULC hot, which corresponds to the letter frequencies in German texts. In contrast, the wheel of fortune in the final sequence Ernstl was often chosen by the candidate, which is based on the Graphotaktik the German language, also only one vowel was allowed here.