Apart from shrdlu (who will know) who knows what the word 'shrdlu' comes from?

Kainantu

SHRDLU was a computer program written by Terry Winograd in 1972 With the idea of speeding up the setting of type, the old Linotype keyboards had their letters arranged in decreasing order of the frequency with which they appear in the language, making the first two rows ETAOIN SHRDLU. This curious phrase is recorded both in the Oxford English Dictionary and also in the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. http://www.quinion.com/words/weirdwords/ww-eta1.htm Other sources http://www.cs.um.edu.mt/~mros/cs305/ Feb 13 03, 11:33 PM

Baloo55th

Interesting. Where I've come across it is in connection with typesetting. If a line of type had to be removed because of an error (uncorrectable but removable), the Linotype operator would stop typing the text and instead would type 'etaoin shrdlu' as an indication that that line was to be removed. Quite often in the Liverpool Echo it wasn't! Feb 13 03, 11:41 PM

Gnomon

The letters of the typesetting machine are set in the order of frequency of the letters in English. E is the most common, so it is first. T is next so it is second, and so on. The top line of the typesetting machine is ETAOINSHRDLU. So SHRDLU are the 7th, 8th, 9th 10th, 11th and 12th most common letters in the English language. Often as a test, printers would type the 12 letters, so ETAOIN SHRDLU appeared on documents like a signature. The name SHRDLU was then used for an artificial intelligence computer program. This was documented by Douglas Hofstadter in one of his books. Feb 14 03, 8:22 AM

Jac

Denis Norden and Frank Muir often used Shrdlu as a word in their My Word scripts, and DN wrote a number of articles about Gobfrey Shrdlu, who he said was the hero of all those misprints. I have a book (dating from the 1960s) of them somewhere, which relates the story of 'Mr Shrdlu's bad day', all told in genuine misprints. I have a photograph of a Linotype machine, showing the keyboard, and completely puzzled my husband by telling him all about Shrdlu... Feb 14 03, 10:03 AM

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