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« Extraterrestres » is typed entirely with the left hand
In English, keyboard lovers know a little treasure: « stewardesses », eleven letters, is typed entirely with the left hand on a QWERTY keyboard. Nobody, it seems, had asked the question for French. So I did — by sifting through nearly 197,000 words. The champion may surprise you.
A silly question, a precise answer
On an AZERTY keyboard, classical touch typing divides letters into two camps. The left hand handles fifteen of them — a, z, e, r, t, q, s, d, f, g, w, x, c, v, b — while the right hand manages only eleven: y, u, i, o, p, h, j, k, l, m, n. So the imbalance is there from the start: fifteen against eleven.
The rule of the game is simple. A word is « typeable with one hand » if all its letters belong to the same camp. To keep the calculation clean, I kept only words written with the twenty-six basic letters, without accents, hyphens or apostrophes — 196,744 forms in all (conjugations and plurals count as distinct words). Then I sorted them.
The left hand takes almost everything
The verdict is clear: 2,272 words can be typed with the left hand alone, compared with only 136 with the right hand. A ratio of nearly seventeen to one. The reason is no accident: on AZERTY, the left hand hosts most of the most frequent letters in French — e, a, s, r, t. In other words, the pillars of the language.
And the overall champion? « extraterrestres » — fifteen letters, not a single one for the right hand. Behind it comes a cohort of improbable verbs drawn from forgotten conjugations: « retraversasses », « extravasasses », « desserrasses »… The left hand, all by itself, can tell stories.
The right hand, the poor relation
On the right, scarcity reigns. Barely one hundred and thirty-six words, and the longest reaches only nine letters: « moinillon » (a little monk) and « philippin ». Below that, a flavorful bestiary: « polonium », « opinion », « million », « minimum », « loukoum », « moulin », « pioupiou », « poupon »… You mostly meet o, i and n there, because those are roughly the only common letters the right hand has. Deprived of e, a and s, it stammers.
Type « pioupiou »: your right fingers dance, the left ones do not move. Type « extraterrestres »: it is the exact opposite.
What this says about our keyboards
This asymmetry is not a whim of French: it is a legacy of hardware. AZERTY descends directly from American QWERTY, designed in the 1870s for typewriters — and never truly rethought according to the frequent letters of French. A few keys were moved; the counts were not redone. Result: our language leans heavily on the left hand.
Alternative layouts exist to correct the imbalance, such as the bépo keyboard, designed in the mid-2000s to place the most used letters under the strongest fingers. But AZERTY remains king by habit — proof that, with keyboards as elsewhere, the most logical option does not always win; the first to arrive often does.
All of this is, in the end, nearly useless. But there is something delightful in discovering that an object as ordinary as a keyboard hides, for anyone willing to count, a secret geography — and that in the land of one-handed words, extraterrestrials are left-handed.
« Extraterrestres » is typed entirely with the left hand
In English, keyboard lovers know a little treasure: « stewardesses », eleven letters, is typed entirely with the left hand on a QWERTY keyboard. Nobody, it seems, had asked the question for French. So I did — by sifting through nearly 197,000 words. The champion may surprise you.
A silly question, a precise answer
On an AZERTY keyboard, classical touch typing divides letters into two camps. The left hand handles fifteen of them — a, z, e, r, t, q, s, d, f, g, w, x, c, v, b — while the right hand manages only eleven: y, u, i, o, p, h, j, k, l, m, n. So the imbalance is there from the start: fifteen against eleven.
The rule of the game is simple. A word is « typeable with one hand » if all its letters belong to the same camp. To keep the calculation clean, I kept only words written with the twenty-six basic letters, without accents, hyphens or apostrophes — 196,744 forms in all (conjugations and plurals count as distinct words). Then I sorted them.
The left hand takes almost everything
The verdict is clear: 2,272 words can be typed with the left hand alone, compared with only 136 with the right hand. A ratio of nearly seventeen to one. The reason is no accident: on AZERTY, the left hand hosts most of the most frequent letters in French — e, a, s, r, t. In other words, the pillars of the language.
And the overall champion? « extraterrestres » — fifteen letters, not a single one for the right hand. Behind it comes a cohort of improbable verbs drawn from forgotten conjugations: « retraversasses », « extravasasses », « desserrasses »… The left hand, all by itself, can tell stories.
The right hand, the poor relation
On the right, scarcity reigns. Barely one hundred and thirty-six words, and the longest reaches only nine letters: « moinillon » (a little monk) and « philippin ». Below that, a flavorful bestiary: « polonium », « opinion », « million », « minimum », « loukoum », « moulin », « pioupiou », « poupon »… You mostly meet o, i and n there, because those are roughly the only common letters the right hand has. Deprived of e, a and s, it stammers.
Type « pioupiou »: your right fingers dance, the left ones do not move. Type « extraterrestres »: it is the exact opposite.
What this says about our keyboards
This asymmetry is not a whim of French: it is a legacy of hardware. AZERTY descends directly from American QWERTY, designed in the 1870s for typewriters — and never truly rethought according to the frequent letters of French. A few keys were moved; the counts were not redone. Result: our language leans heavily on the left hand.
Alternative layouts exist to correct the imbalance, such as the bépo keyboard, designed in the mid-2000s to place the most used letters under the strongest fingers. But AZERTY remains king by habit — proof that, with keyboards as elsewhere, the most logical option does not always win; the first to arrive often does.
All of this is, in the end, nearly useless. But there is something delightful in discovering that an object as ordinary as a keyboard hides, for anyone willing to count, a secret geography — and that in the land of one-handed words, extraterrestrials are left-handed.
« Extraterrestres » is typed entirely with the left hand
In English, keyboard lovers know a little treasure: « stewardesses », eleven letters, is typed entirely with the left hand on a QWERTY keyboard. Nobody, it seems, had asked the question for French. So I did — by sifting through nearly 197,000 words. The champion may surprise you.
A silly question, a precise answer
On an AZERTY keyboard, classical touch typing divides letters into two camps. The left hand handles fifteen of them — a, z, e, r, t, q, s, d, f, g, w, x, c, v, b — while the right hand manages only eleven: y, u, i, o, p, h, j, k, l, m, n. So the imbalance is there from the start: fifteen against eleven.
The rule of the game is simple. A word is « typeable with one hand » if all its letters belong to the same camp. To keep the calculation clean, I kept only words written with the twenty-six basic letters, without accents, hyphens or apostrophes — 196,744 forms in all (conjugations and plurals count as distinct words). Then I sorted them.
The left hand takes almost everything
The verdict is clear: 2,272 words can be typed with the left hand alone, compared with only 136 with the right hand. A ratio of nearly seventeen to one. The reason is no accident: on AZERTY, the left hand hosts most of the most frequent letters in French — e, a, s, r, t. In other words, the pillars of the language.
And the overall champion? « extraterrestres » — fifteen letters, not a single one for the right hand. Behind it comes a cohort of improbable verbs drawn from forgotten conjugations: « retraversasses », « extravasasses », « desserrasses »… The left hand, all by itself, can tell stories.
The right hand, the poor relation
On the right, scarcity reigns. Barely one hundred and thirty-six words, and the longest reaches only nine letters: « moinillon » (a little monk) and « philippin ». Below that, a flavorful bestiary: « polonium », « opinion », « million », « minimum », « loukoum », « moulin », « pioupiou », « poupon »… You mostly meet o, i and n there, because those are roughly the only common letters the right hand has. Deprived of e, a and s, it stammers.
Type « pioupiou »: your right fingers dance, the left ones do not move. Type « extraterrestres »: it is the exact opposite.
What this says about our keyboards
This asymmetry is not a whim of French: it is a legacy of hardware. AZERTY descends directly from American QWERTY, designed in the 1870s for typewriters — and never truly rethought according to the frequent letters of French. A few keys were moved; the counts were not redone. Result: our language leans heavily on the left hand.
Alternative layouts exist to correct the imbalance, such as the bépo keyboard, designed in the mid-2000s to place the most used letters under the strongest fingers. But AZERTY remains king by habit — proof that, with keyboards as elsewhere, the most logical option does not always win; the first to arrive often does.
All of this is, in the end, nearly useless. But there is something delightful in discovering that an object as ordinary as a keyboard hides, for anyone willing to count, a secret geography — and that in the land of one-handed words, extraterrestrials are left-handed.
