When George Bernard Shaw died in 1950, his will provided for the development of a new alphabet for the English language, an alphabet of at least forty letters that could be used to write English without all the oddities of our traditional spelling. I have written an introduction to the Shaw Alphabet, if you are not yet familiar with it.

The Shaw Alphabet font was designed by Kingsley Read in England in the early 1960's. His life's work as a typographer is archived at the University of Reading in England.

Kingsley Read rapidly moved beyond the Shaw Alphabet to develop Quickscript, an extensive modification of the Shaw Alphabet which languished in even greater obscurity than did the Shaw Alphabet itself.

Ross DeMeyere, a professional typographer, designed the Androcles and Ghoti fonts, which were earlier named ShawRough and ShawGothic. This graphic shows you the Shaw Alphabet in his ShawRough font. I recommend you download the Androcles and Ghoti fonts from his Web site. All Shaw alphabet texts in this Web site (the parts that I've updated, anyway) are set to display in ShawGothic, ShawRough, Androcles, Ghoti, and Lionspaw. (Look at the HTML code for this page to see how to do this.)

Unicode is a proposed standard for managing all the world's writing systems on the Web, including Chinese and all the different alphabets of India. A Proposal to Add Shavian to Unicode is pending now. This link has some nice graphics, including the alphabet tables and a text excerpt from the book, and a nicely designed poster. I'm not sure I understand this very well, but I believe that the plan is eventually to have all the world's alphabets accessible to your browser, so that if you surf over to India and download a page in Malayalam, say, it will display in its native alphabet on your screen. (Now if it would just display in your brain so you could read it!)

A marvelous Shaw Alphabet web site is maintained in the UK by someone who calls himself Lionel Ghoti (get it? ;-) This site uses another Shaw Alphabet font, Lionspaw, which is available only for Windows. As far as I can tell, it has the same keyboard mapping as ShawRough and ShawGothic.

Richard Kegler at p22 type foundry did some nice work on Shaw fonts, but has not published any yet.

Simon Barne now imagines a world of advertising and public signage all in Shaw Alphabet, for a proposed Web site - or perhaps for a world. Each graphic is a link to a page - click on all of them! This site in early June 1999 uses the following HTML font coding: face="Ghoti, Lionspaw, ShawGothic, Shaw Gothic, ShawRough, Shaw Rough, Shaw, Androcles"

Phillip Driscoll has designed some stunning Shaw fonts which are now available for downloading. See them at his Web site. You can look at these display fonts and begin to imagine a newspaper!

In 1988 I designed what was almost certainly the first computer Shaw Alphabet font, GBShaw, a bit-mapped Macintosh font which is now of only historical interest. It can still (in 1999) be downloaded from America Online, and it is in many shareware font collections, with its documentation (which I have revised for this Web site.) Its keyboard mapping is wholly different - I simply dropped the reading card on top of the QWERTY keyboard.

A Shaw Alphabet mailing list and bulletin board was set up by E-Group at the beginning of 1999.

Hugh Birkenhead, a student at Whittlesey, near Peterborough in England, has several pages of Shaw Alphabet text he's written himself, on Hugh's Shavian Pages. Hugh has probably written and posted more Shaw Alphabet text than all the rest of us put together.

Andy Callaway in Australia is beginning a most interesting site, including a promised English-to-Shavian translation machine.

Craig Schoonmaker has a brief discussion of the Shaw Alphabet in a long page on English spelling reform. He proposes an orthography he calls Fanetik which is worth seeing. His ideas about the British pronunciation of English may offend some readers on that side of the Atlantic.

The Simplified Spelling Society in England has given some support to the Shaw Alphabet in the past, and they distributed the remaining copies of Androcles and the Lion.

The Advanced Book Exchange sometimes has old copies of the Shaw Alphabet edition of Androcles and the Lion for sale. Lotsa luck!

Here's Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" in Shaw Alphabet, with notes about an American publication of it in Shaw Alphabet.

Shaw wrote a test piece for phonetic alphabets, here transliterated into Shaw Alphabet. Try your hand at it!

Here is something in Shaw Alphabet. It's the 23rd Psalm ("The Lord is my shepherd" - King James version), which I chose because it may be the most frequently memorized text in the English language. (Does anyone have a better idea for a text?) You Brits will have to put up with my American accent, which is pretty close to Ronald Reagan's (NOT a political statement!) If you don't have Androcles, Ghoti, ShawRough, ShawGothic, or Lionspaw in your font file, the text will appear in your default font as badly hashed English.

H /lPd iz mF SepDd;
F SAl nyt wYnt.
hI mEkaT mI t lF dQn in grIn pAscDz:
hI lIdaT mI bIsFd H stil wYtDz.
hI rIstPaT mF sOl:
hI lIdaT mI in H pAHz v rFcasnas
fP hiz nEmz sEk.
jE, HO F wYk TrM H vAlI v H SAdO v deT,
F wil fC nO Ival:
fx HQ Rt wiH mI;
HF ryd n HF stAf HE kumfDt mI.
HQ prIpXast a tEbal bIfP mI
in H prezans v mFn enamIz:
HQ anqntast mF hed wiH ql;
mF kup runaT OvD.
SxlI gUdnas n mxsI SAl fylO mI
Yl H dEz v mF lFf:
n F sAl dwel in H hQs v H /lPd fPevD.