Without context, the word “if” has a small area, dominated by the surrounding words “it” and “of”. This is a side-effect of using the QWERTY layout. If it weren’t for the learning curve involved, we could rearrange the keyboard to put the “i” and “o”, as well as the “f” and “t”, very far apart! We’ve actually done this: we have a paper coming out soon. Incidentally, this is also why the Dvorak keyboard layout is exactly the opposite of what you want in a highly ambiguous scenario; Dvorak places all the vowels adjacent to each other, significantly increasing ambiguity. Intuitively it rearranges word-space to put many common words right next to each other.