www.qrp4fun.de Jumbled letters

Every now and then we see in newspapers or on webpages twisted letters. Sometimes arise funny words that are guaranteed not intended in this context. Somewhere I stumbled upon the following text, which drives it to the extreme.

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. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Who could not read the lines above, for those here follows the answer to the riddle.

According to research at Cambridge University, it doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first letter be at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without a problem. This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself, but the word as a whole.

In 1976, Graham Rawlinson, as part of his dissertation at the University of Nottingham, found that the order of letters within words had only a limited effect on reading comprehension, provided that one or more first and last letters remained correct. The above example has been circulating since 2003.