Why are the letters on a QWERTY keyboard arranged in that order?

gdec1

Frequently used pairs of letters were separated in an attempt to stop the typebars from intertwining and becoming stuck, thus forcing the typist to manually unstick the typebars and also frequently blotting the document http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwerty Jul 26 06, 6:49 PM

Allergic2Life

The important type keys are: ASDFG HJKL; These are the ten keys that one's fingers are intended to be focused on. As stated above, these ten keys are the most frequently used thus increasing the speed of the typist. Jul 26 06, 7:45 PM

What-A-Mess

It is about, as gdec stated, the swing of the old typewriter "arms" and the frequency of the strike path that they needed to take. The picture in this link is the type of type machine that we are refering to concerning the "swing" arc. http://www.typewritermuseum.org/collection/index.php3?machine=underwood5&cat=kf Jul 26 06, 8:21 PM

Kaz784

On a german keyboard they're arranged as QWERTZ with the äöü (umlauts) at the end beside the enter key. don't know why though, maybe more y's are used in english than german Jul 27 06, 3:45 AM