He placed commonly combined letters far apart , and in a malicious slight on right - handers put E , A and T , the three most common letters in the English language , on the left - hand side . The upper row of characters , which began with QWERTY ( slightly different on German keyboards : QWERTZ ) , gave the keyboard its name . The really astonishing thing is that even though the reason for this deliberately un - ergonomic layout is long since history , Qwerty lives on in the age of computers .