Why Do We Still Use QWERTY Keyboards?

By Stacey Vanek Smith,

Tim Harford, Cardiff Garcia

Published April 16, 2019 at 2:00 PM PDT

Q-W-E-R-T-Y, or "QWERTY," are the first six letters on most keyboards in English-speaking countries. That letter sequence seems random. And over time, some have tried to break our QWERTY spell with different letter sequences, but QWERTY has always prevailed — and the reasons contain some economic lessons.

To tell this story, we brought in economist Tim Harford, host of "Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy" for the BBC World Service.

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Stacey Vanek Smith

Stacey Vanek Smith is the co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. She's also a correspondent for Planet Money, where she covers business and economics. In this role, Smith has followed economic stories down the muddy back roads of Oklahoma to buy 100 barrels of oil; she's traveled to Pune, India, to track down the man who pitched the country's dramatic currency devaluation to the prime minister; and she's spoken with a North Korean woman who made a small fortune smuggling artificial sweetener in from China.

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Tim Harford

Cardiff Garcia

Cardiff Garcia is a co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money podcast, along with Stacey Vanek Smith. He joined NPR in November 2017.

See stories by Cardiff Garcia