The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard is a keyboard layout patented in 1936 by August Dvorak, an educational psychologist and professor of education at the University of Washington in Seattle, and William Dealey. It has also been called the Simplified Keyboard or American Simplified Keyboard but is commonly known as the Dvorak keyboard or Dvorak layout. Although the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard ("DSK") has failed to displace the QWERTY, it has become easier to access in the computer age, being included with all major operating systems (such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and BSD) in addition to the standard QWERTY layout. It is also supported at the hardware level by some high-end ergonomic keyboards.


The Dvorak layout was designed to address the problems of inefficiency and fatigue which characterized the QWERTY keyboard layout. The QWERTY layout was introduced in the 1860s, being used on the first commercially-successful typewriter, the machine invented by Christopher Sholes. The QWERTY layout was designed so that successive keystrokes would alternate between sides of the keyboard so as to avoid jams. Dvorak studied letter frequencies and the physiology of people's hands and created a layout to adhere to these principles: Letters should be typed by alternating between hands. For maximum speed and efficiency, the most common letters and digraphs should be the easiest to type. This means that they should be on the home row, which is where the fingers rest, and under the strongest fingers. The least common letters should be on the bottom row, which is the hardest row to reach. The right hand should do more of the typing, because most people are right-handed. Digraphs should not be typed with adjacent fingers. Stroking should generally move from the edges of the board to the middle. An observation of this principle is that, for many people, when tapping fingers on a table, it is easier going from little finger to index than vice versa. This motion on a keyboard is called inboard stroke flow.

The Dvorak layout was intended for the English language. In other European languages, letter frequencies, letter sequences, and digraphs differ from English. Also, many languages have letters that do not occur in English. For non-English use, these differences lessen the supposed advantages of the original Dvorak keyboard. However, the Dvorak principles have been applied to the design of keyboards for these other languages. The layout was completed in 1932 and was granted U.S. Patent 2,040,248 in 1936. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) designated the Dvorak keyboard as an alternative standard keyboard layout in 1982; the standard is X3.207:1991 (previously X4.22-1983), "Alternate Keyboard Arrangement for Alphanumeric Machines". The original ANSI Dvorak layout was available as a factory-supplied option on the original IBM Selectric typewriter. In 1984, the Dvorak layout had an estimated 100,000 users.