Word Welter

Word Welter demonstrates typoglycemia by scrambling the characters in all words in a webpage, except for the first and last.
What is Word Welter?
Word Welter is a Chrome extension that demonstrates typoglycemia by scrambling the characters in all words in a webpage, except for the first and last. It allows users to experience the cognitive processes behind reading written text and explores the concept of typoglycemia.

Extension stats

By: Ben Smith
Users: 58 ▲ 6
Rating: 5.00 (2)
Version: 1.1.3 (Last updated: 2014-06-26)
Creation date: 2014-06-25
Risk impact: Moderate risk impact
Risk likelihood: Low risk likelihood
Manifest version: 2
Permissions:
  • <all_urls>
Size: 159.74K

Other platforms

Not available on Firefox
Not available on Edge
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Extension summary

The inspiration for this extension is a neologism called Typoglycemia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typoglycemia) which is the "purported recent discovery about the cognitive processes behind reading written text".

For example, most people can understand the following even though the text has been scrambled:

"I cdn'uolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg"

The original text is:

"I couldn't believe that I could actually understand what I was reading"

Word Welter randomises the characters in all words in a webpage, except for the first and last characters.

The scrambling code has been developed so that it can cope with many different types of words e.g. words ending in punctuation, words with apostrophes. However, this is not a comprehensive text parser so please let me know if you find any issues.

Unlike the example taken from the aforementioned Wikipedia page, for a word like "couldn't", I have chosen to fix the first character and also the last three (i.e. "n't") and then scramble all the rest; I found that the words get much harder to decipher if this approach is not taken!

User reviews


Fun for pranks, and testing how good you are at reading scrambled text.
View all user reviews

Extension safety

Risk impact

Word Welter requires a few sensitive permissions. Exercise caution before installing.

Risk likelihood

Word Welter has earned a fairly good reputation and likely can be trusted.

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