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
fristand lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae.

The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.Tihs
is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but thewrod
as a wlohe.

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Request for Question Clarification by rainbow-ga on 19 Sep 2003 00:04 PDT

Hi probonopublico,

So, waht etcxlay is yuor qsoeiutn? :)

Rdagers,

rbiaonw-ga

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Clarification of Question by probonopublico-ga on 19 Sep 2003 02:17 PDT

WOW!

I tihnk taht Asnwer Fndeir has got the Asnwer.

Wlel dnoe

Byran

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Request for Question Clarification by ephraim-ga on 19 Sep 2003 06:33 PDT

Probonopublico,

I already posted an answer to this question here:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=257528

If you'd like me to re-post the answer here as well, please advise. :-)

/ephraim

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Clarification of Question by probonopublico-ga on 19 Sep 2003 08:21 PDT

Flul mraks 2 Eahrpmn

Pealse psot yuor awensr

Baryn

Bryan,

As per your request, here is the re-posting of the answer:

The origin of the quote is a bit of blogging (i.e. Web Logging)
experiment that somebody was doing, trying to see how fast this
particular quote would spread around the internet. It's most certainly
done so, and mutated many times, as we can see from the version that
you yourself have posted.

My source for this fact comes from David Harris, the individual who
started it in the first place: [
http://blogs.salon.com/0001092/2003/09/15.html#a464 ].

"By now, you've probably read the "Aoccdrnig to rsereach..." meme
floating about the web. I talked about it last Friday. Since then, the
meme has exploded on the web, and further propagated by Slashdot
today.

What I didn't mention the other day is that I was using this as a very
informal experiment...I wanted to see how this paragraph propagated in
blogspace in different versions...At time of writing, my Friday
version is found by Google on 106 sites."

David claims that he received the original quote in an e-mail from a
friend. If you want, you could try to contact him via his web site and
ask for more details. Most likely, this is an urban myth or a joke.

David's version is slightly different from yours, so it looks like
somebody else modified the quote to do their own test of its
propogation. For example, if I do a Google search on your version
("Acocdrnig to an elgnsih unviesitry"), then I get [
://www.google.com/search?as_q=&num=100&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=Acocdrnig+to+an+elgnsih+unviesitry&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=&safe=images
] which shows 33 results as of this writing. Notice that most (if not
all) of the answers provided by this search are Blogs (Web logs),
which pretty much confirms the original claim by David Harris, above.

I'll note with some amusement that when I tried this search, Google
responded with the unintelligible but hilarious suggestion, "Did you
mean:  "Acocdrnig to an english university"  ", which again proves
that this "quote" has been modified many many times in order to
propogate like a virus through the web.

While this may not have been what you were expecting, David's site
appears to be the likely source of the original quote.

One more link from somebody who has done even more research as to
theorigins of this quote: [
http://www.bisso.com/ujg_archives/000227.html ].

I hope this answers you question. Ask for clarification if you need
it.

Search Strategy: I originally saw this story on [
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/15/2227256&mode=nested&tid=133&tid=134&tid=186
] a few days ago, and just followed the links to provide the answer to
the question.

/ephraim

Utiekestnd.

Mceri!

Bryan...

I tnihk you manet to wirte:

"...the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the 
frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae."

You hvae to go bceuse you msut laern wihch is the frist and lsat ltteer.
aswenrndfier-ga

To add on to answerfinder's answer, you also need to learn which
letters make up the word so you can fill them in between the first and
last letters...wveehcihr way you wnat!

This is a really interesting thread :) I'd never have givewn much
thought to it before, but you are right, we do read by whole-word
recognition. Of course, the last 2 points are also good if amusing
ones

I considered writing this in the style of the post but was not clever
enough to spell the words muddled up consistently !

wolvies, lol

Hah, we only read by whole-word recognition IF we learned to read
before the er, "educational authorities," came up with the bright idea
of using phonics to teach English ...

if u cn rd ths msg u nd 2 gt sm vwls.

Ah byrd I humbly disagree entirely as an ex-primary school teacher.
You LEARN to read, or rather you learn to DECIPHER words with phonics
but once they have become familiar to you, you just read it as a whole
word. For example take any NEW word

squooble

Now, you worked out what it said with phonics
But if you saw it time and again in your usual reading you would know
at once what it says

Adults only tend to come to an understanding of how this works if they
try to learn a foreign language, or pronounce a raft of foreign words
(e.g. learn the names of early 20th century Russian battleships - at
first you are sounding them out, refering to known pronunciation
protocols, but after a while you KNOW what it says)

wolvies