Meanings
qwertyuiop1
- alternativenot comparableAlternative form of QWERTYUIOP.
QWERTYUIOP2
alternative qwertyuiop
- uncountableSynonym of QWERTY.
There follows a certain amount of irrelevant material condemning the QWERTYUIOP keyboard. It's not that it isn't true: we all know that not only is QWERTYUIOP not optimum for touch typing, but that it was designed that way!
1984, Jerry [Eugene] Pournelle, The Users Guide to Small Computers (Pournelle Users Guide; #1), New York, N.Y.: Baen Enterprises, →ISBN, page 662 more examples
In the case of the QWERTYUIOP keyboard, specifically, the obvious questions to pursue are (1) why this particular keyboard letter arrangement came about in the first place (rather than something else), and (2) how it (rather than something else) came to dominate, or became apparently 'locked-in'.
1997, Tony Lawson, “Illustration”, in Economics and Reality, London; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, →ISBN, page 249Oscar had been assured many times that the venerable QWERTYUIOP keyboard design would never, ever be replaced. Supposedly, this was due to a phenomenon called "technological lock-in." QWERTYUIOP was a horribly bad design for a keyboard—in fact, QWERTYUIOP was deliberately designed to hamper typists—but the effort required to learn it was so crushing that people would never sacrifice it.
1998 December, Bruce Sterling, Distraction: A Novel (Bantam Spectra Book), New York, N.Y.: Bantam Books; Bantam mass market edition, New York, N.Y.: Bantam Books, October 1999, page 382Synonyms: QWERTY
Synonyms & antonyms
nounSynonym of QWERTY.
Origin
From the top row of letters on a QWERTY keyboard.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
qwertyuiop. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/qwertyuiop
“qwertyuiop.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/qwertyuiop. Accessed November 2, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “qwertyuiop,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/qwertyuiop.
Source: qwertyuiop on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.