bouma shape

n. a word’s silhouette, recognizable form, or visual impression. Also bouma. Subjects: English, Science, Technology, Jargon

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Citations: 1992 A.W. Senior Cambridge University Engineering Dept. (Dec.) “Off-line Handwriting Recognition: A Review and Experiments”: Taylor & Taylor used these Bouma shapes for a study on the text of their own book, and found that the Bouma shape uniquely specified 6953 out of 7848 words in the sample. 1999 Steven Killings Connect: Information Technology at NYU (New York City) (Feb. 12) “Optical Character Recognition”: In visual terms, a word is distinguished by its characters’ relation to the white space surrounding it and the nature of its letter face (for instance, small thin strokes are common to handwriting, and thick short strokes are common to non-serifed print fonts). Psychologists describe this as its “Bouma-shape” (after Dutch psychologist Herman Bouma) in cognition studies. 2001 M. Michele Mulchahey Canadian Journ. of History (Aug. 1) “Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading” vol. 36, no. 2, p. 323: Nor have the palaeographers and codicologists ever noted one of the most important lexical consequences of the adoption of minuscule, as opposed to majuscule, as a book script is that it contributed, in conjunction with word separation, to giving each word a distinct image, which modern psychologists call the “Bouma shape,” peculiar to Western writing and a significant aid to silent visual processing. 2002 Hrant H. Papazian Typophile Forums (Sept. 25) “Bouma”: I didn’t really invent the term “bouma”: it’s adapted from the term “Bouma-shape” used by Saenger in his “Space between words”; he in turn claims to have taken it from the work of Taylor & Taylor (although I myself have yet to find any such term used by them), and is based on the Dutch psychologist Herman Bouma who formalized empirical research into word-shape-based reading. Professor Bouma himself had never heard of the term (a friend of mine asked him). The only things I can take credit for is making it convenient (a single lc word), and spreading it. 2004 Kevin Larson Microsoft (July) “The Science of Word Recognition”: Some have used the term bouma as a synonym for word shape, though I was unfamiliar with the term. The term bouma appears in Paul Saenger’s 1997 book Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. There I learned to my chagrin that we recognize words from their word shape and that “Modern psychologists call this image the ‘Bouma shape.’”

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