Definition of the word word blindness

The medical term for difficulty in recognizing or comprehending written words, despite having normal vision and cognitive abilities, is "lexical dyslexia" or "dysorthographia." However, the popular term for this condition is "word blindness," which emerged in the mid-twentieth century. The origin of the term "word blindness" can be traced back to a German psychologist, Rudolf Berlin, who coined the phrase in the 1920s. The term reflected the belief that people with dyslexia struggled to identify individual words, as if they were "blind" to the written language. The use of the term "word blindness" gained popularity in the 1950s in the United States, especially after the publication of Samuel T. Orton's book "The Battle of Reading and Writing" in 1951. Orton, a renowned neurologist, used the term to describe a specific type of dyslexia that affected word recognition. The term "word blindness," however, has fallen out of favor among professionals in the field of learning disabilities as it suggests a visual problem rather than a language processing disorder. As researchers have further studied dyslexia, they have recognized that the condition is more complex, affecting various aspects of reading, including phonological processing, decoding, and working memory, beyond simple word recognition. Today, experts use more specific terminology such as dyslexia, reading disorder, or developmental dysorthographia to describe the range of reading problems, emphasizing the need for customized intervention and support based on the unique needs of individuals with dyslexia. Additionally, some individuals with dyslexia prefer to self-identify as "dyslexic" rather than rely on the stigmatizing term "word blind."