English into the Shavian alphabet and back again, live as you type. Or just talk, and watch it appear. Built on the real phonemic lexicon, not a letter-for-letter swap.
Words the lexicon knows are exact. A dotted amber underline means the spelling was worked out from rules and could be off. Dotted blue marks a word with more than one valid spelling depending on meaning — hover to see the alternatives.
Shavian is an alphabet for English that spells sounds instead of history. There are 48 letters, one for each sound the language uses, and nothing silent anywhere. Though becomes 𐑞𐑴 — two letters, because it is two sounds. Through is 𐑔𐑮𐑵. The ough problem simply stops existing.
One caveat on privacy, since the badges above promise a lot. The transliteration is genuinely local — the lexicon ships with the page and your text never goes anywhere. Speaking is different. Browser speech recognition hands your audio to the browser vendor’s servers to transcribe, so the words come back as text but the recording made a round trip. Type if that matters to you.
There are no capital letters. Proper nouns get a small dot in front instead, so Tennessee is ·𐑑𐑧𐑯𐑩𐑕𐑰. Five words are so common they were given a single letter each: the 𐑞, of 𐑝, and 𐑯, to 𐑑 and for 𐑓. Every letter is a single stroke of the pen, which was the whole point — you lift the pen once per letter, never twice.
George Bernard Shaw spent decades irritated by English spelling. He had sat on the BBC's Advisory Committee on Spoken English through the 1920s and 30s, he knew Henry Sweet — the phonetician who became the raw material for Henry Higgins in Pygmalion — and he wrote his own work in Pitman shorthand for years before deciding shorthand could not be typeset and so could never replace ordinary writing.
His argument was economic rather than aesthetic. Every silent letter in English is ink, paper, time and typesetting, multiplied across every book ever printed. He thought the waste was enormous and he thought it was fixable.
So he wrote it into his will in June 1950. Money was set aside to design a new alphabet, and when he died that November the Public Trustee — after a legal fight over the bequest — announced a worldwide design competition. It drew hundreds of entries. Four were judged winners, and Ronald Kingsley Read, a signwriter and letterer from Worcester who had been corresponding with Shaw about exactly this for years, was appointed to merge the four designs into one working alphabet.
Shaw had set three conditions: at least 40 letters, as close to one-letter-one-sound as possible, and visually nothing like the Latin alphabet, so that the new spellings could never be mistaken for bad spelling. The finished alphabet has 48 letters and meets all three.
The estate's money did not go far. After the litigation there was only enough to print a single book: a 1962 Penguin edition of Shaw's own Androcles and the Lion, with conventional spelling on one page and Shavian facing it. Copies went out to major libraries across the English-speaking world. That edition is still the reference standard for how words are spelled — the transliteration was done by the phonetician Peter MacCarthy, and everything since has followed it.
The shapes are not arbitrary. Letters come in three heights. Tall letters — the ones that rise above the line — are voiceless consonants: 𐑐 𐑑 𐑒 𐑓 𐑔 𐑕 𐑖 𐑗. Rotate any tall letter 180 degrees so its stem drops below the line and you get its voiced partner: 𐑐 becomes 𐑚, 𐑑 becomes 𐑛, 𐑒 becomes 𐑜. Put a finger on your throat and say p then b — same mouth, one buzzes. The alphabet writes that relationship directly into the shape.
Short letters carry all the vowels plus the liquids and nasals. Eight more are ligatures for diphthongs and r-coloured vowels, which is why 𐑸 handles the whole of ar in one stroke. Read borrowed the tall-deep pairings from Pitman shorthand, which Shaw had used for most of his working life. The Korean Hangul alphabet does something similar, grouping sounds by how the mouth makes them, though the two were designed five centuries apart and with no connection whatsoever.
Shavian is phonemic rather than phonetic, which is a real distinction. It records classes of sound, not exact sounds. Someone in London, Sydney and Nashville pronounce the vowel in ah quite differently, but all three write 𐑭 and all three recognise it. That is the design working as intended.
The awkward part is that the standard is roughly rhotic Received Pronunciation, and speakers who do not make certain vowel distinctions have to learn spellings they cannot derive from their own accent. Most of North America merges the vowels in father and bother, so 𐑭 and 𐑪 both sound like one vowel and there is no way to guess which one a word wants.
Stress is not marked either. Billow and below come out identically as 𐑚𐑦𐑤𐑴. In practice this matters less than it sounds, because unstressed vowels usually reduce to 𐑩 and that difference does most of the work — the noun convict is 𐑒𐑪𐑯𐑝𐑦𐑒𐑑 while the verb is 𐑒𐑩𐑯𐑝𐑦𐑒𐑑.
And going backwards is lossy. 𐑑𐑵 is a perfectly good spelling of to, too and two all at once. Turning Shavian back into English means guessing which one was meant, and the guess here is simply whichever word is more common. Sometimes it guesses wrong.
Every word is looked up in the Readlex, the lexicon maintained by the Shavian community, which follows the Androcles standard and carries part-of-speech tags. All 77,000-odd word forms are bundled into this page, which covers almost anything you would normally write.
When a word is not in there, the converter tries to take it apart — strip a plural, a past tense, an -ing — and look up what remains, then reattach the right ending. English is fairly regular about this, so bioreactors resolves even though it is nowhere in the lexicon.
If that also fails, it falls back on spelling rules, and those are honestly a bit of a coin toss with English. Anything guessed that way is marked with a dotted amber underline so you know not to trust it. Names are the usual casualty.
The 469 words with more than one valid spelling — read, lead, wind, live, bow, tear — get a dotted blue underline and the alternatives on hover. Picking correctly needs to know what the sentence means, so it takes the more common spelling and shows its work rather than quietly deciding for you.