On 9/11/2017 8:35 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
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.
That's interesting. I've always been told that the the same logic was
used for choosing Morse Code characters - the shortest Morse Code
sequences were the most common letters. Apparently not exactly,
Morse code decoders use a slightly different sequence which is:
ETIANM SURWDKGO
Notably - the letter O is a fairly long sequence and is out of place.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Morse_code_tree3.png
Rob.
