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How Dumb Keyboard Works

Normal smartphone keyboards suggest the most likely next word. Dumb Keyboard does the opposite: it suggests the least likely words.

The Data

We use a word frequency dataset containing 20,000 of the rarest English words, selected from a corpus of 172,000+ words ranked by how often they appear in real text. Words like "the", "and", "is" appear billions of times. The words in our list appear only a few thousand times each.

The Algorithm

When you type a prefix like sn, instead of returning high-frequency matches like "snow" or "snap", we return the lowest frequency words that match:

matches = filter(words, startswith(prefix))
sort(matches, by=frequency, ascending=True)
return matches[0:3]  // rarest first

Examples

You type: Normal keyboard Dumb Keyboard
sn snow, snap snashall, snooting
hel hello, help helyn, helonias
th the, that theandric, theologize

Why?

Because sometimes your phone's keyboard feels like it's already doing this anyway. Now you can embrace the chaos intentionally.