There have been many attempts over the years to redesign the traditional keyboard. Thus far, QWERTY has reigned supreme, and so a string of letters arranged for ease of typing has become the word by which the keyboard is known.

The latest challenger to this is designed with touch screens in mind and similarly takes its name from a string of letters in the arrangement, this time the opposite corner.

The KALQ keyboard is probably the only name that could have been chosen based on the arrangement, as frankly all the other lines produce unpronounceable gibberish, though I like the idea of the GTOJ keyboard challenging for typing supremacy. I wonder if the researchers made sure that there was at least one line which could be spoken to ensure their keyboard had a chance of being publicised.

Mind you, the combined brains of the University of St Andrews, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany and Montana Tech in the US aren’t entirely obsessed with simplicity. They described the old design as trapping people in “suboptimal text entry interfaces”. Well quite.

Another thing that has emerged from this story is the phrase ‘thumb typing’ which is being treated as something linguistically new by the media, a fair point since it doesn’t seem to feature in online dictionaries yet. It obviously means typing with your thumb.

As technology evolves, who knows whether this mode of typing will become the new default, and thumb typing will simply become known as typing in the future, with finger typing then being needed as the word for the old fashioned sort. And as new devices come on the market, who can say what parts of our body we might end up typing with. And that could open up a whole new chapter of neologisms.