You’ve all probably seen this little email come by you at one point or another:
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
Well, I thought, “that’s a load of crap.”
And to prove it, I wrote this little program called Switcharoo!. You feed it a URL (preferably something with a lot of text, like a blog or news article) and it’ll do this little switchy thing to the text. Because of the way English works, we have a lot of 3 and 4 letter words, and you won’t see much difference in those. The big problem comes when it’s something like a 9 letter word. For example, what does this say:
Bhagrna wuokort is a swetay ftsnies coeeitlabrn
Not so easy now, is it? You can probably pick out workout, and sweaty by contextuality. but the rest of it? Does that last word really look anything close to celebration? The whole sentence is “Bhangra workout is a sweaty fitness celebration.”
So, go play with Switcharoo! and see what you find.
2 comments ↓
“Bhagrna wuokort is a swetay ftsnies coeeitlabrn”
That sentence doesn’t really make any sense though, so of course it is hard to decipher it….
“Because of the way English works, we have a lot of 3 and 4 letter words, and you won’t see much difference in those”
That is true… they have tested it in other languages (with longer words) and it is very difficult to read, but it is still very interesting that it works for the English language (your counterexample wasn’t really a coherent sentence and there werent other words to gain contextuality). There are many interesting theories developed from this study.
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