TYPING MADNESS

10 Words And Phrases Typed Using Just One Row On The Keyboard

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Have you ever tried to see how many words you can write using just one row on the keyboard? Well, although you might have to squeeze your brain a little, it turns out there are a lot of one-row words! But why stop at just words? Meaningful phrases can be constructed too, if you have the patience. After reading the ones we have come up with, try and see how many more you can find!

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Isn’t it ironic? Picture yourself in front of an old-timey typewriter, a gentle breeze coming from an open window on a summer afternoon. And then clack, clack, clack, you find out that you can write "typewriter" with just one row.

Also, did you know that the QWERTY keyboard layout we use today was first devised in the early 1870s? Some things are older than you think.

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It sounds made up, doesn’t it? However, if you are well-versed in medicinal plants, you might already be familiar with this one. The smooth rupturewort, the common name of the Herniaria glabra, is a plant found in Europe and North America that is used for various medicinal purposes. Its name comes from the ancient belief that it was a remedy for hernia ruptures.

It is also considered a sturdy ground-covering plant, known for being resistant to droughts and thriving in poor soils.

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"A proper prototype, innit?" This alliterative conjunction sounds like something taken out of a British sci-fi script. The longest word that can be written with the top row of a QWERTY keyboard is actually quite close: proterotype, meaning "a first or primitive type." Look it up in the dictionary, it’s there!

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Pier doesn’t feel like writing his poetry homework, and he needs to be reminded to keep his focus by his very stern mother. If you are so inclined or want to give Pier a break, try and write a one-row poem. They say creativity flourishes under limitations!

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A trope can be a figure of speech, or, in literature, a common theme or cliché. Similarly, trite is something (an opinion, an idea) tired and overused. Many tropes can indeed be a bit trite, like the protagonist who needs to save the world, or the successful person who returns to their small hometown. However, one could argue that no trope is necessarily trite by itself, maybe it just needs better writing.

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Alfalfa prefers to grow in temperate climates, so this one must be a blatant lie, or so I thought. Apparently, a team of scientists back in the 70s engineered a variety resistant to the Last Frontier’s extremely harsh winters by crossing common alfalfa plants with Siberian species. Although the crop’s popularity never caught up with the industry, there are some plans to bring it back.

So, Alaska may have alfalfa, after all. Ahoy, and north to the future!

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Maybe I will pass on this one. To be honest, algal salsa doesn't sound too yummy. That being said, a lot of foods are made with edible algae, and even soy sauce can be made of fermented seaweed instead of, well, soy. Kelp and other types of marine flora are harvested to make gel-forming products like algin, agar, or carrageenan, that end up in all sorts of processed foods, even ice-cream!

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Our poor gal has started a diet, and she’s obviously sad because all she has now for lunch is a meager salad. Long gone are the fries and burgers, but don’t despair, salad doesn’t have to be lean and flavorless to be healthy. Also, in case you didn’t know, gal is not exactly a real word, but rather a phonetic transcription used in written English to represent the way certain accents pronounce the word girl.

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The lads are back in town, and they are throwing up a special gala to celebrate the occasion. If you are not invited, worry not, you can still have fun with some etymology. The word lad can be traced back to Middle English ladde, meaning either "foot soldier" or "young male servant." It eventually evolved to refer to almost any young man or boy. Gala, on the other hand, is a borrowed word from Old French, meaning "merriment."

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An onomatopoeia for the sound of a bee buzzing. This may be cheating, but try and come up with anything better with just the bottom letters of a QWERTY keyboard. A fun fact regarding this one: it is considered a cross-linguistic onomatopoeia, meaning it is replicated in a very similar fashion in different languages worldwide. And yes, that also means not all onomatopoeias are directly understood by speakers of different languages, despite the fact that they are all based on specific sounds.