Dvorak is the most famous attempt ever made to replace QWERTY — a 1936 design that lines up every vowel on the left home row and the commonest consonants under the right hand. Below is the full arrangement with every changed key highlighted, the genuinely messy history of its speed claims, and how to try it today without installing anything.
Highlighted keys sit in different positions than on US QWERTY — and here that is nearly every printing key: only A, M, the digits and a few symbols hold their ground. The five vowels A O E U I line up on the left home row with the five commonest consonants D H T N S directly opposite, the punctuation marks ' , . take over QWERTY's Q W E corner, and the brackets migrate to the number row's right end, displacing - and = down into the letter block.
Dvorak is what a keyboard looks like when it is designed from data instead of inherited from typewriter mechanics. August Dvorak, an education professor at the University of Washington, and his brother-in-law William Dealey spent years on letter-frequency tables and motion studies before patenting their layout in 1936. The logic is visible at a glance: all five vowels sit on the left home row and the five most frequent consonants on the right, so roughly 70% of English keystrokes land on the home row — QWERTY manages about 32%. Because English alternates vowels and consonants so heavily, the hands alternate too, each one loading a stroke while the other fires.
The design also pushes work toward strength: the right hand — most people's dominant one — carries slightly more than half the load, the strongest fingers carry the busiest keys, and awkward same-finger sequences are rare. Dvorak claimed a full day's typing marched a QWERTY typist's fingertips 12 to 20 miles, against roughly one mile on his layout. Modern software analysis confirms the direction of every one of these claims, if not always the magnitude: on finger travel, home-row load and hand alternation, Dvorak beats QWERTY decisively on paper.
Whether that translates into meaningfully faster typing is the layout's eternal controversy. The famous wartime Navy study reporting spectacular retraining payoffs was run under Dvorak's own supervision while he held the patent; the 1956 government study that reported no worthwhile gain had methodological problems of its own. Economists Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis picked the whole record apart in their 1990 paper The Fable of the Keys, arguing the evidence for dramatic superiority was thin. The sober modern reading: Dvorak genuinely reduces finger travel and many switchers report greater comfort, but speed gains are modest — practice matters far more than layout.
August Dvorak and William Dealey began their research in the 1920s, drawing on letter-frequency counts and the industrial motion studies of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. They filed for a patent in 1932, received US Patent 2,040,248 in May 1936, and published the layout the same year alongside Dvorak's book Typewriting Behavior. They called it the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, and typing-contest wins by Dvorak-trained students through the late 1930s gave it early publicity.
Its institutional moment came and went during the 1940s and 50s. A 1944 US Navy experiment — conducted while Dvorak, then a Navy lieutenant commander, held both the study reins and the patent — reported that retraining typists paid for itself within days. But a 1956 General Services Administration study led by Earle Strong, a researcher openly hostile to the layout, concluded retraining was not worth the cost, and federal interest died. Dvorak himself died in 1975, reportedly embittered that the world would not change. The 1990 Liebowitz and Margolis paper The Fable of the Keys later turned this whole saga into a famous economics case study on how weak the evidence on both sides had been.
Computers gave Dvorak its second life: switching layouts became free. ANSI recognized Dvorak as an alternative standard in 1982, Apple built a hardware Dvorak switch into the Apple IIc in 1984, and every major operating system has shipped it built-in for decades. It never threatened QWERTY's dominance, but it remains the elder statesman of alternative layouts — the design every successor, from Colemak to Workman, is measured against.
Slightly, at best — and the honest answer is contested. Dvorak clearly wins on paper metrics like finger travel and home-row usage, and many switchers report better comfort. But the famous studies were compromised on both sides — the pro-Dvorak Navy study was run by Dvorak himself, and the 1956 rebuttal had its own flaws — and controlled modern comparisons find modest differences. Practice beats layout: skilled typists exceed 200 WPM on QWERTY.
Almost everything: only A and M keep their QWERTY positions. All five vowels line up on the left half of the home row (A O E U I) and the five most common consonants on the right (D H T N S), which is why about 70% of English keystrokes never leave the home row. The punctuation marks ' , and . move to the top-left, and the brackets join the number row.
Most switchers reach basic fluency in two to four weeks of regular practice, but matching a former QWERTY speed typically takes one to three months, since 24 letters change position. Going cold turkey is faster than switching back and forth, at the cost of a painful transition period — plan it for a light-typing stretch of your calendar.
Not currently — this site's on-screen keyboards focus on language layouts, and there is no Dvorak input page. The good news is you do not need one: Dvorak is built into Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS, so you can enable it in your keyboard settings in seconds. Once it is active, the typing speed test linked below works perfectly for measuring your Dvorak progress, since it reads whatever layout your system produces.
Switching costs and network effects. By the time Dvorak arrived in 1936, the world had sixty years of QWERTY machines, typists and training schools, and retraining an experienced typist costs weeks of lost productivity for a modest payoff. The 1956 government study gave institutions official cover to stay put. Economists still argue about whether that outcome was a market failure or a rational verdict on a small advantage.