Typoglycemia is a neologism given to a purported recent discovery about the cognitive processes behind reading written text. The word appears to be a portmanteau of "typo", as in typographical error, and "hypoglycemia". It is an urban legend/Internet meme that appears to have an element of truth to it.
The legend, propagated by email and message boards, purportedly demonstrates that readers can understand the meaning of words in a sentence even when the interior letters of each word are scrambled. As long as all the necessary letters are present, and the first and last letters remain the same, readers appear to have little trouble reading the text.
One email message reads as follows:
However, the following example based on the same principle, but where all the interior letters are reversed rather than randomly jumbled, is much more difficult to read:
No such research was carried out at Cambridge University.
The creation of such email messages started with a letter to the New Scientist magazine from Graham Rawlinson of Nottingham University in which he discusses his Ph.D. thesis, suggesting to keep the first and last two letters of each word:
However, a more plausible scientific basis to the origins of this work is given by Dominic Massaro, who identifies Tim Jordan and his colleagues who, based on their published research investigating the relative influences of the exterior and interior letters of words (first published in 1990), showed over a number of papers that the exterior letters of words are special in reading.