Wikipedia
In typography, a bouma is the shape of a cluster of letters, often a whole word. It is a reduction of "Bouma-shape", which was probably first used in Paul Saenger's 1997 book Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, although Saenger himself attributes it to Insup & Maurice Martin Taylor. Its origin is in reference to hypotheses by prominent vision researcher Herman Bouma, who studied the shapes and confusability of letters and letter strings.
Some typographers have believed that, when reading, people can recognize words by deciphering boumas, not just individual letters, or that the shape of the word is related to readability and/or legibility. The claim is that this is a natural strategy for increasing reading efficiency. However, considerable study and experimentation by cognitive psychologists led to their general acceptance of a different, and largely contradictory, theory by the end of the 1980s: parallel letterwise recognition. In recent years (2000–2010) this information has been more evangelized to typographers by Microsoft's Dr Kevin Larson, with conference presentations and a widely read article.
Bouma is a West Frisian surname. Notable people with the surname include:
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:nl:Arnold Bouma (1932–2011), Dutch geologist
- The Bouma sequence in sedimentology is named after him
- Clarence Bouma (1891–1962), Dutch-born American theologian and professor
- Gary Bouma (born 1942), American-born Australian professor of sociology
- Herman Bouma (born 1934), vision researcher
- Lance Bouma (born 1990), Canadian ice hockey centre
- Nicole Bouma, Canadian voice actress
- Thijs Bouma (born 1992), Dutch footballer
- Wilfred Bouma (born 1978), Dutch footballer