Typoglycemia is the lighthearted name given to a purported recent discovery about the cognitive processes behind reading written text. The name makes little sense as glycemia is the concentration of glucose in the blood. It is an urban legend/Internet meme that does have some element of truth behind it.
The legend is propagated by email and message boards and demonstrates that readers can understand the meaning of words in a sentence even when the letters of each word are scrambled. As long as all the necessary letters are present, and the first and last letters remain the same, readers turn out to have little trouble reading the text.
The phenomenon is illustrated by this widely-forwarded e-mail message:
While typoglycemic writing may be easy to understand, creating it is slow going. Consequently, a typoglycemia translator has been created to hlep you wtrie yuor own tmylyieogpcc msegesas or gaert Aermcian nveol.
The major part of this posting was taken from the Wikipedia article “Typoglycemia” under the GNU Free Documentation License.
The legend is propagated by email and message boards and demonstrates that readers can understand the meaning of words in a sentence even when the letters of each word are scrambled. As long as all the necessary letters are present, and the first and last letters remain the same, readers turn out to have little trouble reading the text.
The phenomenon is illustrated by this widely-forwarded e-mail message:
I cdn'uolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg: the phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to a rsceearch taem at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Such a cdonition is arppoiatrely cllaed Typoglycemia.In actual fact, no such research was carried out at Cambridge University. It all started with a letter to the New Scientist magazine from Graham Rawlinson in which he discusses his Ph.D. thesis.
Amzanig huh? Yaeh and you awlyas thguoht slpeling was ipmorantt.
While typoglycemic writing may be easy to understand, creating it is slow going. Consequently, a typoglycemia translator has been created to hlep you wtrie yuor own tmylyieogpcc msegesas or gaert Aermcian nveol.
The major part of this posting was taken from the Wikipedia article “Typoglycemia” under the GNU Free Documentation License.
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