What is "etaoin shrdlu"

1931, journalism slang, the sequence of characters you get if you sweep your finger down the two left-hand columns of Linotype keys, which is what typesetters did when they bungled a line and had to start it over. It was a signal to cut out the sentence, but sometimes it slipped past harried compositors and ended up in print.

n. Nonsense, filler text, or an example of accidental typing.

Etaoin shrdlu is a nonsense phrase that sometimes appeared in print in the days of " hot type" publishing because of a custom of type-casting machine operators. It appeared often enough to become part of newspaper lore, and "etaoin shrdlu" us listed in the Oxford English Dictionary and in the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.

It is the approximate order of frequency of the 12 most commonly used letters in the English language.