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Etaoin shrdlu () is a nonsense phrase that sometimes appeared in print in the days of "hot type" publishing because of a custom of type-casting machine operators. It appeared often enough to become part of newspaper lore. It is the approximate order of frequency of the 12 most commonly used letters in the English language. ==History== The letters on type-casting machine keyboards (such as Linotype and Intertype) were arranged by letter frequency, so e-t-a-o-i-n s-h-r-d-l-u were the lowercase keys in the first two vertical columns on the left side of the keyboard. When an operator made a mistake in composing, they would often finish the line by running their finger down the first two columns of the keyboard and then start over. Occasionally the faulty line of hot-metal type would be overlooked and be printed erroneously. This happened often enough for "etaoin shrdlu" to be listed in the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' and in the ''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''. A documentary about the last issue of ''The New York Times'' to be composed in the hot-metal printing process (2 July 1978) was titled ''Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu''. In the early days of computer studies of language, an examination of newspaper text and television news copy included a letter frequency count, followed by a journal article. Irving Fang concluded that the linotype machines got it nearly right, but that the actual frequency of letters in the English language is ETAONI RSHDLC.〔(Irving E. Fang, "It Isn't ETAOIN SHRDLU; It's ETAONI RSHDLC," ''Journalism Quarterly,'' December 1966, vol. 43, no. 4, pages 761-762 )〕 Peter Norvig used the Google Books Ngrams corpus in 2013 to determine the frequencies of use, resulting in the order ETAOIN SRHLDCU.〔(Peter Norvig "English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited or ETAOIN SRHLDCU" )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「etaoin shrdlu」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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