Scrambling the letters of words

Joi Ito notes that English is readable if the letters of words, except the first and last, are scrambled. It works in other languages, too, but nearly as well. English is also quite legible even if vowels are dropped. Finnish, which relies less on whole word recognition, is much harder to read when scrambled or vowels are dropped. Jamie Zawinski has written a perl script that scrambles words.

---

• September 16, 2003 at 17:16
  in Language, Sleight of mind

There is 1 other entry posted on this day.