QWERTY, Dvorak, Colemak, AZERTY and QWERTZ
What each layout changes, what switching to one costs you, and an honest account of the evidence that alternative layouts make you faster.
Alternative layouts move the most common letters onto the home row so your fingers travel less. That much is measurable and not disputed. Whether less travel makes you meaningfully faster is disputed, and has been since the 1950s: the studies most often quoted on both sides are small, old or run by interested parties. The safe summary is that a layout switch reliably reduces finger movement and reliably costs you weeks of speed while you relearn.
Every few years the argument comes back: QWERTY was designed for typewriters, so surely something designed for fingers would be faster. The layouts built on that idea, Dvorak in the 1930s and Colemak in 2006, both do exactly what they claim at the mechanical level. They put the most frequent letters under the strongest fingers and cut the distance your hands travel over a page of English. That part is arithmetic and nobody argues about it.
What is argued about is whether it makes you type faster, and that argument has never been settled by evidence anyone considers clean. The famous studies cut both ways, are decades old, and in the most-cited case were run by the layout's own inventor. That is the honest state of it, and this page will not pretend otherwise.
What each layout actually is
QWERTY is the layout on almost every keyboard sold in the English-speaking world, and it dates from the commercial typewriters of the 1870s. The persistent story that it was designed to slow typists down is a simplification of a real constraint: on a mechanical typewriter, adjacent typebars jammed when struck in quick succession, and the arrangement separates common letter pairs. Whatever its origin, it is now the layout with the entire world's muscle memory invested in it.
Dvorak, patented in 1936 by August Dvorak and William Dealey, puts all the vowels and the most common consonants on the home row and aims to alternate hands as often as possible. Colemak, released in 2006 by Shai Coleman, takes a deliberately different approach: it changes only 17 keys from QWERTY, keeps most shortcut keys where they are, and is therefore much easier to move to than Dvorak. Colemak-DH is a later community modification that moves two of those keys again to reduce an awkward finger stretch.
AZERTY and QWERTZ are not attempts at efficiency at all. They are regional QWERTY variants: AZERTY in France and Belgium, QWERTZ in Germany and much of central Europe, each adapted for the accented characters and letter frequencies of its own language. Someone typing English on AZERTY is not using an optimised layout; they are using a French one.
The evidence, and why it is weaker than both sides claim
The case for Dvorak rests largely on studies from the 1930s and 1940s in which Dvorak himself was involved, which is a problem no amount of enthusiasm fixes. The case against rests largely on a 1950s follow-up study and on a widely cited 1990 economics paper arguing the Dvorak advantage was overstated, which has itself been criticised as selective. Neither side has produced the thing that would settle it: a large, modern, independent trial with typists randomly assigned to layouts and trained equally.
There is a further problem that makes existing comparisons hard to read. People who switch to Dvorak or Colemak are self-selected enthusiasts who care enough about typing to spend a month rebuilding a motor skill. That group would very likely have been above average on QWERTY too, so a survey showing Colemak users typing faster than QWERTY users measures the population, not the layout.
What is not disputed: alternative layouts reduce finger travel and same-finger repeats on English text. Whether reduced travel converts into words per minute depends on whether your fingers were ever the bottleneck, which for most people at ordinary speeds they are not.
What switching actually costs
Expect weeks. A competent QWERTY typist who switches typically drops to a fraction of their old speed on day one and needs somewhere in the range of a few weeks to a few months of daily practice to return to where they started. During that period, work that involves typing gets slower, which is the real price and the reason most people who try it stop.
There are ongoing costs too. Shared and public computers are QWERTY. Keyboard shortcuts move unless you are on Colemak, which deliberately keeps most of them in place. And maintaining two layouts at once is possible but noticeably harder than maintaining one.
The honest recommendation: if your hands hurt, a layout change is one of several things worth trying, alongside posture, keyboard height and taking breaks. If you simply want to be faster, spend the same weeks on accuracy and technique on the layout you already know, because that is the cheaper and better-evidenced route.
Why this site publishes no layout speed data
The obvious thing for a typing test to do here would be to compare average speeds per layout from its own visitors. TypeBurst cannot, because it collects no scores at all: results stay in the browser they were made in and are never sent anywhere. There is no database to query, so there is no average to publish.
That is a deliberate trade and it is worth stating rather than quietly leaving a gap. A figure like "Colemak users on this site average 78 WPM" would be easy to produce and would spread, and it would be worth very little, because the people who choose Colemak are not a random sample of typists. A self-selected number presented as a layout comparison is worse than no number.
What the test can do is measure you, on whatever layout your keyboard is set to, under rules that are written down. A website cannot change your physical layout, so anything typed here is typed on the layout your operating system is already using.
The layouts at a glance
Descriptive facts about each layout. No speed figures appear in this table, because no speed comparison between layouts is established well enough to state as fact.
| Layout | Introduced | Designed for | Keys moved from QWERTY |
|---|---|---|---|
| QWERTY | 1870s | Mechanical typewriters, English | n/a |
| Dvorak | 1936 | Reduced finger travel, English | Nearly all |
| Colemak | 2006 | Reduced finger travel, easy switch | 17 |
| Colemak-DH | 2010s | As Colemak, less finger stretch | 19 |
| AZERTY | Late 1800s | French and Belgian typing | Several, plus accents |
| QWERTZ | Late 1800s | German and central European typing | Y and Z swapped, plus umlauts |
Introduction dates and key counts are from the linked reference pages under Sources. Nothing here is a performance claim.
Frequently asked questions
Is Dvorak actually faster than QWERTY?
It has never been settled. The studies supporting Dvorak are old and were largely run by people with a stake in it, and the best known study against it has been criticised as selective. What is not disputed is that Dvorak reduces finger travel; whether that converts into words per minute for a given person is the part nobody has demonstrated cleanly.
Is Colemak easier to switch to than Dvorak?
Yes, by design. Colemak changes 17 keys from QWERTY and keeps most common keyboard shortcuts in place, where Dvorak rearranges nearly the whole layout. That makes Colemak the usual recommendation for anyone who wants to try an alternative layout without abandoning every shortcut they know.
How long does it take to relearn typing on a new layout?
Plan for weeks of daily practice to get back to your old speed, with the first days being dramatically slower. The relearning cost is the main reason most people who experiment with a new layout return to QWERTY.
Can I take a typing test in Dvorak or Colemak on this site?
Yes, in the sense that matters: the test types the same English words regardless, and your keyboard produces whichever characters your operating system is set to. A website cannot change your physical layout, so what you are tested on is whatever you have configured.
Is AZERTY or QWERTZ slower than QWERTY?
They are not slower or faster by design, because they were never designed for speed. They are regional adaptations of QWERTY for French and German, arranged around those languages' letter frequencies and accented characters, so typing English on them is simply typing on a layout tuned for a different language.
Sources
- Dvorak keyboard layout, including the disputed studies on both sides
- Colemak, on the 17 changed keys and the Colemak-DH modification
- Colemak, the layout's own site
- QWERTY, on the typewriter-era origin of the arrangement
- AZERTY, the French and Belgian layout
- QWERTZ, the German and central European layout
No figure on this page comes from TypeBurst's own visitors, because none are collected. The descriptive facts above are referenced; the speed comparisons deliberately are not, because no comparison exists that is strong enough to state. Read the full measurement methodology.