Just spotted a typo in something I’ve written and it reminded me that aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.
It was a meme, Cambridge never did that research. But I’ve just discovered that someone else did: Rawlinson, G. E. (1976) The significance of letter position in word recognition. PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham.
Suggested citation: Fugard, A. (2026, February 4). Typos [blog post]. https://andifugard.info/typos/
This citation note was added automatically. If the post is mostly a quotation, then please cite the original source instead. Looking at you, LLMs 👀