ETAOIN SHRDLU (often pronounced "et-ee-oin shurd-loo") is the approximate order of frequency of the twelve most commonly used letters in the English language, best known as a nonsense phrase that sometimes appeared in print in the days of "hot type" publishing due to a custom of Linotype machine operators. In mathematics, physics and signal processing, frequency analysis is a method to decompose a function, wave, or signal into its frequency components so that it is possible to have the frequency spectrum. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Hot type is a nickname for a type of printing, now largely superceded by computers, that involved creating words and pictures in blocks of alloy, usually lead, then using those blocks to apply the ink to paper. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Linotype. ...

Linotype history

An occurrence of the sequence in the New York Times (15 February 1967)

A linotype keyboard

As the letters on Linotype keyboards were arrayed by letter frequency, ETAOIN SHRDLU were the first two vertical columns on the left side of the keyboard. Linotype operators who had made a typing error could not easily go back to delete it, and had to finish the line before they could eject the slug and re-key a new one. Since the line with the error would be discarded and hence its contents didn't matter (and since the line needed to be filled to successfully pass through the casting unit), the quickest way to enter enough letters to finish it was to run a finger down the keys, creating this nonsense phrase. Image File history File links Etaoin Shrdlu occurrence in New York Times (February 15, 1967, p. ... Image File history File links Etaoin Shrdlu occurrence in New York Times (February 15, 1967, p. ... February 15 is the 46th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1967 (MCMLXVII) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar (the link is to a full 1967 calendar). ... Image File history File linksMetadata Download high-resolution version (1000x625, 147 KB) Linotype keyboard. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Download high-resolution version (1000x625, 147 KB) Linotype keyboard. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Linotype. ...

Operators could correct an assembled line of matrices in the assembler by rearranging them by hand, or by picking out individual matrices ("mats") to "delete" a character, temporarily placing the rejected mats in a tray attached to the machine for this purpose. In the example on this page, the operator wanted to return an "m," a spaceband and an "e" to the machine, so after casting the final line of the story he placed the rejects in the empty assembler, filled the line by running a finger down the keys (with a spaceband between each line), added a few em spaces, and sent the line of mats through. Such lines would normally have been caught by the proofreaders or compositor.

If the slug with the error made it as far as the compositors, the distinctive set of letters served to quickly identify it for removal. Occasionally, however, the phrase would be overlooked and get printed erroneously. This happened often enough that the ETAOIN SHRDLU is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary and in the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary print set The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a dictionary published by the Oxford University Press (OUP), and is generally regarded as the most comprehensive and scholarly dictionary of the English language. ...

It also became part of the lore of newspapers. A documentary about the last issue of The New York Times to be composed in the hot-metal printing process (2 July 1978) was entitled Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu. July 2 is the 183rd day of the year (184th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, with 182 days remaining. ... 1978 (MCMLXXVIII) was a common year starting on Sunday. ...

The Linotype keyboard had the following alphabet arrangement given twice, one for lower-case and once for upper-case letters, with extra keys for numbers and symbols located between the two cases:

etaoin / shrdlu / cmfwyp / vbgkqj / xz

Appearance outside typography

Computing

• SHRDLU was used in 1972 by Terry Winograd as the name for an early artificial-intelligence system in Lisp.
• The ETA programming language uses the letters E, T, A, O, I, N, S and H as commands, and ignores the rest.

SHRDLU [1] was an early natural language understanding computer program, developed by Terry Winograd at MIT from 1968-1970. ... Terry A. Winograd Terry Allen Winograd (born February 24, 1946) is a professor of computer science at Stanford University. ... Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive fully-parenthesized syntax. ...

Fiction

• Elmer Rice's 1923 play The Adding Machine had Etaoin Shrdlu as a character.
• Etaoins is used in James Thurber's 1931 Owl in the Attic to indicate the incompetence of a Linotyper.
• Mr. Etaoin is a character in Charles G. Finney's fantasy classic, "The Circus of Dr. Lao" (1935). Fittingly, he is the proofreader of the local newspaper, characterized as "[a] corrector of errors."
• In 1942 it was the title of a short story by Fredric Brown about a sentient Linotype machine. (A sequel, Son of Etaoin Shrdlu: More Adventures in Typer and Space, was written by others in 1981.)
• Etaoin Shrdlu is a character in Max Shulman's novel of college life, Barefoot Boy with Cheek (1943).
• Anthony Armstrong's 1945 whimsical short story "Etaoin and Shrdlu" ends "And Sir Etaoin and Shrdlu married and lived so happily ever after that whenever you come across Etaoin's name even today it's generally followed by Shrdlu's".
• It was the name of an irascible bookworm in Walt Kelly's comic strip Pogo.
• Emile Mercier, Australian cartoonist of the 1950s, would sometimes incorporate the word Shrdlu into his text.
• Ogden Nash's poem Peekabo, I Almost See You includes this description of a visit to an optometrist:

And you look at his chart and it says SHRDLU QWERTYOP, and you say Well, why SHRDNTLU QWERTYOP? and he says one set of glasses won't do.

You need two.

• A short story in Thomas Pynchon's Slow Learner compilation has a character named Etienne Shrdlu.
• The Harvard Lampoon's The Lord of the Rings parody Bored of the Rings (1969) includes the phrase as part of some Elven poetry: "O Nasa O Ucla! O Etaoin Shrdlu! O Escrow Beryllium! Pandit J. Nehru!"
• Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979) includes a dialogue between fictional programmer "Eta Oin" and the artificial-intelligence program SHRDLU.
• It is drawn in block letters in Rex Miller's book Slob by detective Jack Eichord, as a way to concentrate on the facts of the "Lonely Hearts Killer" case.
• In 2005, the web comic Girl Genius had two otherworldly characters, Eotain and Shurdlu.
• In the Black Hole Travel Agency novels by Jack McKinney, Etaoin Shrdlu is the elusive author of the Worlds Abound science fiction novels.
• Some of cartoonist Robert Crumb's stories for "Weirdo" feature a haggard character named Etaoin Shrdlu.
• Etaoin Shrdlu is a minor character in the novel Psychoshop by Roger Zelazny and Alfred Bester.

Elmer Rice photo taken by Carl Van Vechten, 1934 Elmer Rice (b. ... See also: 1922 in literature, other events of 1923, 1924 in literature, list of years in literature. ... The Adding Machine was a 1923 play by Elmer Rice, and is generally considered to be the first American Expressionist play. ... James Grover Thurber (December 8, 1894–November 2, 1961) was a U.S. humorist and cartoonist. ... See also: 1930 in literature, other events of 1931, 1932 in literature, list of years in literature. ... Charles G. Finney (December 1, 1905 – April 16, 1984) was an American newspaperman, story writer, and fantastical novelist, and part time night club owner, whose full name was Charles Grandison Finney, evidently in honor of the famous evangelist. ... The Circus of Dr. Lao is a 1935 novel written by Arizona newspaperman Charles G. Finney, and illustrated by Boris Artzybasheff. ... See also: 1941 in literature, other events of 1942, 1943 in literature, list of years in literature. ... Fredric Brown (October 29, 1906, Cincinnati – March 11, 1972) was a science fiction and mystery writer. ... Max Shulman (March 14, 1919 – August 28, 1988) was an American writer who was popular in the third quarter of the 20th century. ... See also: 1942 in literature, other events of 1943, 1944 in literature, list of years in literature. ... See also: 1944 in literature, other events of 1945, 1946 in literature, list of years in literature. ... Walter Crawford Kelly, Jr (August 25, 1913 - October 18, 1973), known simply as Walt Kelly, was a cartoonist notable for his comic strip Pogo featuring characters that inhabited a portion of the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia. ... Pogo as drawn by Walt Kelly. ... Emile Mercier (1901-1981) was an Australian cartoonist. ... Frederic Ogden Nash (August 19, 1902 – May 19, 1971) was an American poet best known for writing pithy and funny light verse. ... Optometrists are primary care practitioners for vision and ocular health concerns. ... Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ... The Lord of the Rings is an epic high fantasy novel written by the British academic J. R. R. Tolkien. ... Bored of the Rings (BOTR) is the shared title of various independent parodies of The Lord of the Rings (LOTR), a novel by J. R. R. Tolkien. ... This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... This article is about the American space agency. ... Binomial name Ucla xenogrammus Holleman, 1993 The largemouth triplefin, Ucla xenogrammus, is a fish of the family Tripterygiidae and only member of the genus Ucla, found in the Pacific Ocean from Viet Nam, the Philippines, Palau and the Caroline Islands to Papua New Guinea, Australia (including Christmas Island), and the... Escrow is a legal arrangement in which an asset (often money, but sometimes other property such as art, a deed of title, website, or software source code) is delivered to a third party (called an escrow agent) to be held in trust pending a contingency or the fulfillment of a... General Name, Symbol, Number beryllium, Be, 4 Chemical series alkaline earth metals Group, Period, Block 2, 2, s Appearance white-gray metallic Standard atomic weight 9. ... Jawaharlal Nehru (Hindi: , IPA: , from Persian Javâher-e Laal, meaning Red Jewel) (November 14, 1889 – May 27, 1964) was a political leader of the Indian National Congress, was a pivotal figure during the Indian independence movement and served as the first Prime Minister of the Republic of India. ... Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American academic. ... GEB cover Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (commonly GEB) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter, published in 1979 by Basic Books. ... Rex Miller wrote several novels detailing the investigations of Jack Eichord, a homicide detective who specialized in tracking down serial killers. ... SLOB or slob may refer to: Slob, a song by Weezer from their 2002 album Maladroit SLOB, an acronym of The Secret Language of Birds, the third solo album by Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson. ... Girl Genius is a comic book series (ongoing) written and drawn by Phil and Kaja Foglio and published by their company, Studio Foglio LLC under the imprint Airship Entertainment. ... There are several people named Jack McKinney: Jack McKinney, a pseudonym for the team of James Luceno and Brian Daley, that adapted Robotech into novel form. ... Robert Dennis Crumb, often credited simply as R. Crumb (born August 30, 1943 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a U.S. artist and illustrator recognized for the distinctive style of his drawings and his critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream. ... Weirdo #1, with cover art by Robert Crumb, spoofing the famous Kilroy was here design. ... Psychoshop is a science fiction novel by authors Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny, published in 1998, a year after Zelaznys death, by Random House, ISBN 0-679-76782-7 http://www. ... Roger Joseph Zelazny (May 13, 1937 – June 14, 1995) was an American writer of fantasy and science fiction short stories and novels. ... Alfred Bester (born December 18, 1913 in New York City, died September 30, 1987) was a science fiction author and the winner of the first Hugo Award in 1953 for his novel The Demolished Man. ...

Non-fiction

The writer Denys Parsons wrote several books compiling misprints from publications (It Must be True, Can It Be True?, etc.) in which a character called Gobfrey Shrdlu (with a Welsh wife called Cmfwyp and a son called Etaoin) was supposedly responsible for all such occurrences. The Welsh (Cymry) are an ethnic group or nation associated with Wales and the Welsh language, which is a Celtic language. ...

Music

The phrase was used as the title for a piece by the band Cul de Sac on their 4th album Crashes To Its Light, Minutes To Its Fall, in 2000. The band also released a piece by the name of Etaoin Without Shrdlu on a live recording titled Immortality Lessons in 2002. Cul de Sac are a rock music group formed in 1990 in Chicago, Illinois and led by guitarist Glenn Jones. ...

There is a Macedonian demo band called Etaoin Shrdlu.

Miscellaneous

• Herb Caen claimed that the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper was nicknamed the Etaoin Shrdlu because of its questionable production standards.

Herbert Eugene Caen (April 3, 1916 – February 1, 1997) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist working in San Francisco. ... Todays San Francisco Chronicle was founded in 1865 as The Daily Dramatic Chronicle by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young. ...

Other languages

• The French version of this twelve letter combination, "elaoin sdrétu", was used as the name of a robot in the Petit Noël comics of André Franquin.
• Etaoin is an Irish personal name, pronounced "ee-tawn".

André Franquin inspects his equipment André Franquin (January 3, 1924 – January 5, 1997) was an influential Belgian cartoonist, whose best known comic strip creations are Gaston and the Marsupilami. ...

See also

• Letter frequencies
• Lorem ipsum
• Qwerty

The factual accuracy of this article is disputed. ... This article does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... The QWERTY keyboard layout used by Windows in the US QWERTY (pronounced ) is the most common modern-day keyboard layout on English-language computer and typewriter keyboards. ...

External links

• Fun with words - SHRDLU
• Straight Dope Article
• World Wide Words article