Etaoin Shrdlu was most importantly one of Walt Kelly's characters in
Pogo.
ETAOIN SHRDLU ETA name
On Mon, 11 Sep 2017, Chris Elmquist via cctalk wrote:
I was told that the name came from this string which could be found in
printed works and that people had always seen it but just read past it
because it didn't fit or make sense.
That is canonically "loren ipsum", the filler "greeking" text used to set
up layout.
Although admittedly ETAOIN SHRDLU was also sometimes used for greeking.
ETAOIN SHRDLU
is one of the common versions of the list of the relative frequency of
letter in English language text.
'e' is the most common letter
't' is the next most common letter
'a' is the third most common letter, etc.
The first dozen letters are generally agreed to have pretty much that
relative frequency, with some disagreements, largely based on the samples
used for the statistical data.
The further down the list that you go, the more likely that you will find
different sequences, particularly in different genres.
If you count letters in Shakespeare, Gideon bible, New York Times, etc.,
by the time that you get to the end of those dozen letters, you may start
to see some discrepancies.
In very low level cryptography, any sufficiently long message coded with a
"Caesar cypher" can be easily broken just by assigning 'e' to the most
common letter, 't' to the next most common, and paying attention to the
limited number of one and two letter words.
There are a few other fine points, such as a different sequence for what
are the most common letters to be the first letter of a word (look at the
thickness of different letters in the dictionary, or to be the last letter
of a word. (Compaq and news of the last few decades have dramatically
increased the incidence of 'Q' as last letter)
Notice also, that in Morse code and other variable length encodings, the
most common letters are generally assigned the shortest sequence of
symbols.
"Etaoin shrdlu definition: the letters produced by running the finger down
the first two vertical rows of keys at the left of the keyboard of a
Linotype machine: used . . . "
Do you suppose that the designers of the machine knew about or cared
about the frequency of use of letterss?
(It is sometimes stated that Sholes deliberately chose QWERTY to slow down
typists to the speeds that the early typewriters could handle; that story
has been challenged, but a replacement story of how that layout was chosen
has not been advanced)
The Linotype layout may be why that was sometimes more convenient to input
in a hurry than "Ipso Lorem"
"Correlation V causation":
Have those letters BECOME the most commonly used in English due to the
influence of typesetting? :-)
