Bouma

The term bouma (pronounced "bowma") is sometimes used in the work of cognitive psychology to mean the shape of a cluster of letters, often a whole word.

Some typographers believe that, when reading, people can recognize words by deciphering boumas, not just individual letters. The claim is that this is a natural strategy for increasing reading efficiency. However, considerable study and experimentation by cognitive psychologists has led to their general acceptance of a different, and largely contradictory, theory: parallel letterwise recognition.

The term bouma 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 a prominent vision researcher, H. Bouma, who studied the shapes and confusability of letters and letter strings.