Shavian is an alternate writing system for English, where one sound corresponds to one letter, and vice versa (for the most part). It was published in 1962, and added to Unicode in April 2003.
The alphabet is partially featural, which means related sounds have related shapes, such as /p t k s/ being ๐ ๐ ๐ ๐, and their voiced versions, /b d g z/ being their flipped versions, ๐ ๐ ๐ ๐.
Shavian.info also has a list of fonts that support Shavian.
A recurring design decision I have made with these fonts is to make the letters all have the same height, which I refer to as โunicase Shavianโ (which is not entirely accurate, since Shavian has no letter case to begin with, but since this makes Shavian look more like all-caps Latin text, I found the term to be apt enough).
However, a glaring problem presents itself when removing the height distinction: the consonant characters ๐ ๐ ๐ ๐ and the vowel characters ๐ช ๐ง ๐จ ๐ฉ are only distinguished by height, so they have to be distinguished some other way.
I was inspired by this image from one of Kingsley Readโs earlier drafts for what would eventually become Shavian, where he tackled this very same problem of unicase Shavian.
Image from this article by
Leo Philip.
Read added crossbars on the stems to signify how many rule lines the letter was to cross. He also had looped letters, which went unused in the final Shavian alphabet.
Based on those, ๐ and ๐ gained loops to resemble the Latin โPโ and โbโ, while ๐ and ๐ gained crossbars to resemble โfโ.
Hal is a pair of pixel fonts designed to go along with the CGA 8ร16 system font. It comes in two flavors: โSansโ, which follows my personal intuition of how a Shavian system font should look like, and โSerifโ, which follows the graphical stylings of the original font more closely.
They are named in reference to HAL-9000, the fictional supercomputer from 2001: a Space Odyssey, which was confirmed to be named after IBM, each letter shifted one letter backward.
The Hal Shavian superfamily is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Nihonium Shavian Mono is a Shavian extension to Nihonium113 Console, my 8ร12 monospace font inspired by Chicago by Susan Kare.
Nihonium Mono Shavian is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Calculus Shavian is a 5ร7 dot matrix display style font. In contrast to existing dot matrix display fonts, which have a 2px ascender and no descenders, Calculus has a 1px ascender and 1px descender, effectively shifting the baseline and x-height up one pixel. This helps preserve readability of, and symmetry between, the tall and deep letters. The Latin portion and digits have been modified accordingly.
The font is named after the math discipline of calculus, the AP classes for which require a Texas Instruments graphing calculator. At the time the author went to high school, only TI-84 was allowed; the TI-84 uses a similar 5ร7 font.
Calculus Shavian is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Iotacism Shavian is a typewriter-style monospace font. It is built off of the open-source font Iosevka by Belleve Invis. Iosevka was chosen for its resemblance to the Latin portion of the font used in the typewritten font used in Shaw-Script.
After learning lessons from Couth #43, Iotacismโs Shavian letterforms have flat horizontal terminals. This makes the typewrite-style compound letters look more natural. There is also a modified version called Iotacism #43 Linked which pre-composes and pre-connects the compound letters while keeping them double-wide.
Iosevka by Belleve Invis is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Iotacism is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Couth Shavian is a typewriter-style monospace font. It is built off of the open-source font Courier Prime by Quote-Unquote Apps, also available on Google Fonts. Courier Prime is in turn based on Howard Kettlerโs Courier font, made famous by its inclusion in the Core Fonts for the Web
Couth #48 is the standard 48-letter Shavian we know and love. Couth #43, however, decomposes 7 of the 8 compound letters for the 43-letter Shavian style used in the typewritten Shaw-Script journal. However, the design of the curved terminals does not lend very well to this design choice.
Couth Shavian also supports the 6 Extended Shavian characters from Inter Alia (), accessible with the same method: adding U+FE00 VARIATION SELECTOR 1 after the 6 base
characters (๐บ ๐ป ๐ ๐ ๐ข ๐ค).
Courier Prime by Quote-Unquote Apps is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Couth Shavian is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Dexelia is a calligraphy-style font with novel stylings. The Shavian glyphs were drawn by me, and the font was assembled by DexterZ99, with additional Latin glyphs drawn by him too. He seems to have imagined an alternate reality in which Shavian-using calligraphers have tried to adapt the Latin alphabet by bringing it closer to Shavian letterforms.
Dexelia by UkiyoMoji Fonts and DexterZ99 is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Americium is a blobby retro-futuristic font with two stroke thicknesses in one. It is a Shavian adaptation of Stan Davisโs font โAmeliaโ from 1964 (or 1965 or 1967 depending on which source you ask), and is famous for being used in the โMOON BOOTโ logo and the logo for the Beatlesโ movie โYellow Submarineโ.
Americium is a radioactive chemical element, first synthesized in 1944 (but kept secret until November 1945 since it was part of the Manhattan Project). This name was chosen not only due to its alphabetic proximity to โAmeliaโ, but due to Amelia being created in the latter half of the Atomic Age (1945–โ80s), a synthetic, radioactive element seemed to fit the retrofuturistic aesthetic of the font.
Amelia by Stan Davis is a proprietary design. US copyright law does not protect font designs, only font code.
Americium is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Allstars Shavian is a sentence-case Shavian 8x8 pixel font. Its uppercase Latin portion was based on the text from Super Mario All-Stars.
A major update was performed on 2025-03-02. Certain letter forms were redrawn, and the family expanded to two weights, light and bold.
Allstars Shavian is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Stampatello Faceto is an open-source block-script handwriting font based on my own handwriting on a Stabilo 7mm felt tip pen. It supports ligatures for ๐ฉ๐ฏ, ๐พ๐ฏ, and ๐ฆ๐ for a more natural feel.
โStampatello facetoโ is Italian for โfacetious block scriptโ; I chose the Italian term because Italian block script writes the lowercase โaโ in its 2-storey form like I do!
It also supports Cyrillic, polytonic Ancient Greek, and (a lot of) IPA.
Stampatello Faceto is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Space Mono Shavian is a Shavian extension of Space Mono by Colophon. It is geometric, and its most distinguishable feature is the thin joints where two near-parallel strokes meet.
The original Space Mono by Colophon is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Space Mono Shavian is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Audio Nugget is a rounded blocky display font inspired by the Y2K aesthetic. Its name is a reference to the YouTube channel DankPods, who reviews music players which he calls โnuggetsโ.
Audio Nugget is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence — free for personal and commercial use.
Born2bSporty FS is a pixel font with 2px strokes and a high x-height. It has expansive multilingual support spanning 6 writing systems (Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hiragana, Katakana, Shavian) and lots of accented characters, technical characters, and symbols.
It is a remake of the original Born2bSporty font.
Born2bSporty FS is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Consistency is a modern serif font with a tall x-height, designed for children and academics alike.
Consistency Shavian is an unofficial extension of the font Computer Modern Serif, which was created by Donald Knuth as the default font for TeX.
Computer Modern by Donald Knuth is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Consistency is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Banter Shavian is a comic-style display font intended for onomatopoeia and yelling. Two versions are available: โUnicaseโ and โTrilineโ.
Banter is an unofficial extension of the font Bangers by Vernon Adams, which has been skewed 11° to the left to undo its slant. The user is free to skew it as they wish. Banter also enhances the multilingual support of Bangers, and expands its Latin portion to support countless languages.
Bangers by Vernon Adams & contributors is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Banter is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Mikado Shavian is a playful rounded font, originally by Hannes Van Dรถhren. It had also been my branding font for years, prior to switching to Bricolage Grotseque! This is an (unauthorized) extension of its Bold weight for the Shavian alphabet.
After 3 years of being bold-only, Mikado Shavian was updated on 2025-04-09 to add the Regular weight!
Mikado by Hannes van Döhren is a proprietary design. Use at your own risk!
Mikado Shavian is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Starzoom Shavian is a futuristic display font. It has angular cutaways that suggest speed, and is also available with a slant for a bit of extra speediness.
Starzoom is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
As an overdue April Foolโs joke on 2024-04-03, I made a Deseret version of Starzoom.
Download
Back Log Shavian is a comic book font based on Back Issues BB by Blambot Comic Fonts (free for non-profit or indie comics use). It is a unicase styled font.
Back Issues BB is licensed under Blambot Fontsโ non-commercial licence — free for personal use only. Use at your own risk.
Back Log is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Impetus Shavian is a bold, industrial display font that adapts the design of Impact by Geoffrey Lee, made famous by its inclusion in the Core Fonts for the Web and its eventual notoriety as the image macro meme font. If you want to make memes in the Shavian alphabet, here's your match!
Impact by Geoffrey Lee is a proprietary design. US copyright law does not protect font designs, only font code.
Impetus is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Minecraft Shavian is an 8px proportional pixel font that adapts the look of the default system font of Minecraft.
This font is in no way associated with Minecraft or its rightsholders.
Minecraft Shavian is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
Fami Sans Bold Shavian is an 8px fixed-width pixel font that mimics the look of 8-bit video games, such as on the Famicom/NES. It is a unicase styled font.
The Fami superfamily is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.
SixFour Shavian is an 8px fixed-width pixel font that mimics the look of the Commodore 64โs default font. It is a unicase styled font.
SixFour is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence v1.1 — free for personal and commercial use.