What is the difference between a key and a button?

It’s wrong because it is. A keyboard is a specific thing. It might make logical sense that it is buttons, because we are pushing the number, letter, or symbol, but buttonboard simply isn’t the term that is used. Buttons usually turn things on and off. Or, on clothing they are for fastening or decoration.

keys have a soft binding. buttons are hard coded or hard wired.

@ARE_you_kidding_me
Would that not mean that an old mechanical typewriter has buttons?

Manual typewriters had keys. I don’t remember calling it a keyboard though.

For that matter even electric typewriters had keys. I don’t remember using the term keyboard until computers.

Pianos had keyboards long before computers were invented.

But I think @JLeslie is right, a button is usually a toggle switch of some kind, to turn a particular feature on or off.

I think it would be strange to play in the “button” of C!

I grew up writing on typewriters and remember using the word keys but not keyboards. That started, at least for consumers, as a computer term. Language, especially tech language, changes rapidly. For example, isn’t the term “input method” newer, or at least becoming more common, than “keyboard.”

Context

I just looked at my pc and said the first thing that came to mind as I focused on each labelled plastic bit. I naturally called all the things with square or rectangular shapes keys. The round ones that controlled power, sound on/off and volume I called buttons.

(The round joystick in the center I called a clit. No one heard me say this.)

You can call a keyboard a horse if you want, but people won’t know what you are talking about unless you say keyboard.

Well, on type writers the “key board” was an integral part of the typewriter. The term “key board” came about because a key board for a computer can be removed, or replaced. In fact, you don’t even NEED a key board to navigate and type on the computer. Found that out the hard way when I had the shop. When it got too hot my key board would lock up. I found that I could do everything with just a mouse. In some cases, faster than I could do it with a keyboard.

A keyboard was originally the mechanism of a musical instrument the meaning was later extended to other machines. Typing on a keyboard isn’t unlike playing a piano or an organ. Accordions with a series of buttons rather than piano style keys are called button accordions.

The lines of terminology became blurred, I think, with the advent of Blackberries & similar devices that have tiny keypads whose elements are functionally alphanumeric keys yet physically more like buttons. Still, I never heard “buttonpad” used by anybody.

@ragingloli These days “keys” tend to be soft coded or are not of a permanently fixed nature. Back in the stone age when we used typewriters I think “button” and “key” were more interchangeable. I personally see little difference, most things are not hard wired anymore.

A key is a portion of a mechanism that adjusts said mechanism’s function.
i.e. lock/key

A button is a self contained mechanism that is itself the means of function.
i.e. doorbell

So, should our key boards be called button boards?

@Dutchess_III
Drive on parkways, park on driveways. |English|

I once worked in a lock factory where there were many many keys, but no buttons to be seen! except on the clothing LOL!)