How the quest to type Chinese on a QWERTY keyboard created autocomplete

These 44 keystrokes marked the first steps in a process known as "input" or shuru: the act of getting Chinese characters to appear on a computer monitor or other digital device using a QWERTY keyboard or trackpad. Across all computational and digital media, Chinese text entry relies on software programs known as "input method editors"--better known as "IMEs" or simply "input methods" (shurufa). IMEs are a form of "middleware," so named because they operate in between the hardware of the user's device and the software of its program or application. Whether a person is composing a Chinese document in Microsoft Word, searching the web, sending text messages, or otherwise, an IME is always at work, intercepting all of the user's keystrokes and trying to figure out which Chinese characters the user wants to produce. Input, simply put, is the way ymiw2klt4pwyy … becomes a string of Chinese characters.