The designers of the Linotype machine arranged its keyboard for optimum speed, assuming that the most common letters of English were e,t,a,o,i,n,s,h,r,d,l,u in that order.  The Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition) has some amusing citations

Knuth, Donald E.

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138 ETAOIN SHRDLU NON-CRASHING SETS ALA DONALD E. KNUTH Stanford, California The designers of the Linotype machine arranged its keyboard for optimum speed, assuming that the most common letters of English were e,t,a,o,i,n,s,h,r,d,l,u in that order. The Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition) has some amusing citations: The author sends in a manuscript without exclamation marks. The linotyper puts them in, the author takes them out in proof, the linotyper puts them back in, together with a couple of etaoins (J. Thurber, Owl in Attic, 1931) What I love about newspapers is their etaoin shrdl (Listener, 15 ]un 19(7) I 	LOl of pleasure but also a lot of anxiety and heart-searching. I etaoinshrdlu cmfwyp shrdlu cd showed that cinema and per­Mrs Nissel said that the study forming arts ticket prices had more or less remained in line with the Retail Price Index up to 1975/76 (Daily Telegraph, 13 Sep 1983) Are there twelve five-letter words, made up of those twelve let­ters, having no common letters in any position? Using my personal list of 5727 words, there are 924 words made from only those let­ters, but no solutions to the problem. On the other hand, if one asks for only eleven disjoint words instead of twelve, my program found 43,888 solutions. The nicest of these was: third,ideal,dolls,ninth,stunt,erase,radii,heron,usher,outdo,aloha, I investigated the 43,888 solutions to see which five-letter strings would make a full set. Exactly 10,406 different strings resulted. And only one of these, trull, was a word in my on-line dictionary. So I found a unique solution to my problem: adieu,issue,ohhhh,eland,uteri,snoot,trull,lotsa,reran,nadir,hunts,dildo There are other possibilities if I lower my standards slightly. For example, if I allow HindU., I get three more solutions: hindu,torsi,ahhhh,neato,ultra,stunt,droid,ideal,osier,radon,ensue,lulls hindu,assai,ohhhh,idiot,troll,latus,delta,utero,slain,nurse,round,ender hindu,uteri,ohhhh,lasso,asana,rerun,idiot,tulle,nodal,enter,slots,druid and a fourth comes by changing (slots, druid) to (sluts ,droid) . Or, if Nehru is legitimate (a Nehru jacket), we have: nehru,ennui,usual,idler,stood,altho,hadda,orals,thine,rosin,durst,lieth nehru,ennui,usual,idiot,ortho,theta,harsh,diode,alder,lulls,rosin,stand and another when (ortho,alder) is changed to (altho,order). Obvio­usly, the most troublesome word to include is the one ending in U! PAUL MAX New York. Editor ,,!: Cryptop An unu vised by 1860s beg explanatio zles, disl was esotel These phr of its un and bemu with verb correlatior of the sut a synthetj guage in historical/ behind the It is DC over the as 7000; t such as , them have his metho( ently, his that he fe (according represent subjected scrutiny, reference. Dynasty in hence, it phrases. h lights of \ ately, sine ly conceall years ago the part of can be rec lying each Copyright ~ 

Etaoin Shrdlu Non-Crashing Sets

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Etaoin Shrdlu Non-Crashing Sets

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