page_title: Etaoin shrdlu
section_title: Appearances outside typography
hierarchical_section_title: Etaoin shrdlu / Appearances outside typography
caption_attribution_description: English: Linotype keyboard. Keys are arranged by order of frequency as they appear in the English language. Note that upper- and lower-case letters have separate keys. Français&#160;: Clavier de linotype. Les clés sont arrangées par ordre de fréquence d’apparition des lettres en anglais. On notera que les majuscules et minuscules ont des groupes de clés différentes. Русский: Линотипная клавиатура. Клавиши упорядочены по порядку частоты использования в английском языке. Обратите внимание, что буквы верхнего и нижнего регистров имеют отдельные клавиши.
context_page_description: Etaoin shrdlu is a nonsense phrase that sometimes appeared in print in the days of "hot type" publishing because of a custom of type-casting machine operators to fill out and discard lines of type when an error was made. It appeared often enough to become part of newspaper lore - a documentary about the last issue of The New York Times composed using hot metal was titled Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu - and "etaoin shrdlu" is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary and in the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
  It is the approximate order of frequency of the 12 most commonly used letters in the English language.
context_section_description: The phrase has gained enough notability to appear outside typography, including:
caption: A Linotype machine keyboard. It has the following alphabet arrangement twice, once for lower case (the black keys) and once for upper case (the white keys), with the keys in the middle for numbers and symbols: etaoin / shrdlu / cmfwyp / vbgkqj / xz
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