Talk:Typoglycemia

Keep this
Someone is bound to try and speedy this. For about 2 seconds, I wuz going to do it myself; but this is one of those rare cases where not only the article of seeming gibberish, but even the very peculiar format, should be kept, I think: so this is my preëmptive objection against any speedy delete or Vfd. The mdiuem is the massgee, in sum. Bill 9 July 2005 19:06 (UTC)
 * Color me conservative, but I think the bulk of the article should use standard English orthography. The text as it stands is one of those ubiquitous emails that gets forwarded around. FreplySpang (talk) 9 July 2005 19:13 (UTC)
 * There, I added an intro. FreplySpang (talk) 9 July 2005 19:20 (UTC)
 * Chicken....! Well I suppose we have to be serious, but between NPOV and seriousness, Wickedpedia really is kinda flat sometimes.... (On the other hand I'm delighted my filters are working efficiently: I've never got the e&#8209;mail!) &#8212; Best, Bill 19:37, 9 July 2005 (UTC)

Thanks both of you for your quick response and co-operation. Since I'm Afrikaans speaking, and my spelling is very bad :-) I was unable to produce a proper introduction, so thanks FreplySpang for improving my article, and Bill, I'm on my way to visit your website! JohanL 20:00, 9 July 2005 (UTC)

THIS IS TRUE!
This stuff is not an urban legend. It's true, atleast to me.

I can read the text fine. Don't know how i do it, though.


 * It is definately not true. It can be done the 'random' scrambling is done to assist your interpretation.  For example, if I took 'calendar', and spelt it 'claendar', you probably get it right.  If I instead write 'cdaenalr', not so easy.  Or howabout the following sentances:
 * "It has lnog been an aoixm of mnie taht the ltlite tgnihs are itileifnny the msot irapnomtt."
 * "He akeatctd eyinhetrvg in lfie wtih a mix of eoitdrararxny guiens and nviae iteepncocmne, and it was oetfn dcilifuft to tlel wcihh was wchih." --Recurring 14:55, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Useful entry -- VOTE TO KEEP
The editorial note questions the "validity" of the article owing to the Wiki "notability guideline" -- and/or the "validity" of the purported "condition" of typoglycemia. It is precisely because of the latter -- the questionablilty of the condition -- that the article deserves to STAY.

\yet the phenominon of being able to comprehend the scrambled words is apparent. The articles deserves to STAY in order to establish just that: it is not a board-certified conditional broadly acknowledged by the medical community... just a fun word for an easily demonstrable phenominon.

I can well envision someone seeing the term in print (or email or web-page), and turning to Wikipedia to look it up. It deserves an entry to establish the origin and nature of the term. -- Harasty 12:56, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

A counter-example
Rather than edit the page, I will present it here and leave it to the powers-that-be to make any appropriate change. In response to the original post I saw:

A) Acocdrnig to an elgnsih unviesitry sutdy the oredr of letetrs in a wrod dosen't mttaer, the olny thnig thta's iopmrantt is that the frsit and lsat ltteer of eevry wrod is in the corerct ptoision. The rset can be jmbueld and one is stlil able to raed the txet wiohtut dclftfuiiy.

came this counter-example:

B) Anidroccg to crad–cniyrrag lcitsiugnis planoissefors at an uemannd utisreviny in Bsitirh Cibmuloa, and crartnoy to the duoibus cmials of the ueticnd rcraeseh, a slpmie, macinahcel ioisrevnn of ianretnl cretcarahs araepps sneiciffut to csufnoe the eadyrevy oekoolnr.

Counter-Example Spoiler


 * Cases A) is quite readable, while case B) is gobbledegook. One would not really know whether some text turns out like A) or like B), which makes Typoglycemia a stupid idea.

Kdq (talk) 04:32, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

-- I removed this counter-example, because the actual research dictates that the first two and last two letter have to remain the same. In this counter-example, only the first and last letters remain the same, so it is not true to the original research. There's no need to have a counter-example to an unscientific, undocumented cognitive "phenomenon" purported by a chain e-mail. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.112.144.242 (talk) 14:37, 23 October 2008 (UTC)


 * First of all, the original meme/chain letter claims that only the first and last letter have to stay the same, not the first 2 and last 2. Second, why would you remove a counter-example to a bogus chain e-mail?  People might start to believe it when it is clearly false. Kjl (talk) 20:36, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

Article Needs Descriptive Name
I suggest we give this page a more descriptive name, like "Rawlinson Misspelling Effect". This would counteract the tendency of rumormongers to delete the name of the source -- which is a major impediment to fact checking. And even if people on the street omit Rawlinson's name and call it 'the misspelling effect', at least that would be enough to Google and find this page. Google gives higher rank to page titles. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.191.83.49 (talk) 18:08, 29 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm agree. Typoglycemia is the meme. Rawlinson's Significance of Letter Position in Word Recognition Ph.D. Thesis, 1976, Nottingham University is prior to, and the origin of, the meme. But what could be a good new title?
 * Rawlinson's 1976 Significance of Letter Position in Word Recognition Ph.D. Thesis
 * Rawlinson's Significance of Letter Position in Word Recognition Thesis
 * Rawlinson's Significance of Letter Position in Reading Thesis
 * Rawlinson's Significance of Letter Position Thesis (I like this one)
 * Rawlinson's Letter Position Thesis
 * Lacrymocéphale 17:24, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

If (and it's not clear to me) the semi-spurious phenomenon is actually referred to as typoglycemia, that seems better than a convoluted description which doesn't really constitute an encyclopedia article name. Ben Finn (talk) 22:50, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Am I the only one who doesn't get the pun? I find this lemma very confusing. What has scrambling letters to do with blood sugar? --88.73.54.240 (talk) 12:17, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

While the phenomenon appears to be true, I can't see a source for the name used here. Suggest renaming or adding source containing the name used here. 81.152.213.246 (talk) 10:24, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

Removal of: Counter examples
On 8 Jan 2013, I removed the Counter examples section as none of the examples listed conformed to the stated rules, and thus do not counter the claim. The stated rules are that all words should contain the same letters, with the first and last two letters being the same and the remainder (middle ones) being in any order. Hence Tanzania is not the same as Tasmania, Armenia is not the same as America, and neither is Martin Kemp the same as Mein Kampf. Greyskinnedboy  Talk  21:14, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Linkspam
I see my removal of the excessive links on the page was reverted, supposedly because "The suggested resources are useful for an esoteric subject like Typoglycemia." In general, it's poor practice to revert a major edit wholesale without making an attempt to discuss the issue first. The vast majority of the links are simply to apps and scripts that scramble words, without any real analysis on the concept of "typoglycemia". At best, one such link is enough to demonstrate the concept; the rest do not do anything different. The fact that the article is "esoteric" in the first place suggests that it is not really notable enough to warrant its own article (see WP:N); all but one of the links under "References" discuss the same topic anyway (Rawlinson's letter and the thesis it refers to), and the other link is not discussed in the article at all. See WP:LINKFARM and WP:EL. Honestly, this article should probably be merged with another article that discusses the phenomenon more broadly, because it doesn't seem like there's enough actual resources/info to support an article (besides lots of people saying "this must be true because it seems true to me"). If I'm wrong on that front, it needs to be majorly expanded with references to actual reliable sources. --V2Blast (talk) 03:43, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

I am not the user who reverted your edit, although I agree it would be helpful maintain a link to at least one of the tools. (Full disclosure, I'm the one who wrote Scrambler) --Rkagerer (talk) 07:09, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

note that "appropriately" is mis-mis-spelled
the first jumbled appropriately has only two p's; should have three! it is nifty that my eye caught that on my first read — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.105.41.187 (talk) 20:15, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Subtle Clarity Needed To Help Readers
All: Example of why this page is important, but why it's overstating the case. I'm writing an article, looking for the common term for the limited human ability to recognized scrambled letters and human variation in the detection of scrambled letters. Typoglycemia appears in search results on every search engine. I come to wikipedia and it doesn't help. Why? Because the underlying effect exists, the neologism exists, but the internet claims about this effect are somewhere between pseudoscience and accumulated rumor that vastly ovestate the effect and its origins.

Recommended Edit:

Typoglycemia (a humorous portmanteau of "typo" and "hypoglycemia") is a pseudoscientific neologism for the *Transposed letter effect that emerged as an internet meme during the early 2000's, and since then has evolved into a niche vernacular according to google trends. The Transposed Letter Effect explains that readers can comprehend text despite 'scrambled' letters - limited spelling errors and misplaced letters within words - as long as sufficient cues to identify the word by gestalt pattern recognition remain, and the words aren't unfamiliar, long, or compounds.

The following example of typoglycemic text was circulated on the Internet in September 2003:

"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."

Although the text is littered with errors, it is still relatively easy to make out the words.

False Claims
However, the rumors about the Trasnposed Letter Effect evolved into an urban legend and Internet meme that only appears to be correct.[1]
 * 1) No such research was carried out at the University of Cambridge.[1] These emails may have been inspired by a letter from Graham Rawlinson of the University of Nottingham to New Scientist in 1999[2] in which he discusses his 1976 Ph.D. thesis,[3] or perhaps by the research of Thomas R. Jordan's group on the relative influences of the exterior and interior letters of words.[4]
 * 2) The assertions that only lateral letters matter, that the first and last letters must be correctly placed, and that repeating letters remain together, are untrue.[1]
 * 3) The example doesn't distort shorter words, longer words and uncommon or unfamiliar vocabulary remain unreadable.

2601:188:4101:D000:75DC:3B82:B3A3:E299 (talk) 17:26, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

literature
English 2409:4071:2110:C80D:0:0:DEA:B0AC (talk) 18:07, 12 February 2021 (UTC)