WAZU JAPAN's Gallery of Unicode Fonts

This page tests the Shavian Unicode block (U+10450 - U+1047F).
It is part of the Gallery of Unicode Fonts and is based on the following sources:

• The Unicode Standard (version 5.0.0)
• The Shaw Alphabet editon of Androcles and the Lion by Bernard Shaw.

The Shavian 'Proposed British Alphabet' was created in the 1950s by Kingsley Reed as part of a £500 competition financed by a trust set up under George Bernard Shaw's will. Shaw's goal was to both reform spelling and speed writing. The alphabet met the goal but was never adopted.

pick the desired font name

The selected font must be installed on your system. This page might not display properly with older versions of Internet Explorer or Netscape. Additionally, Netscape & Firefox may show an unsupported character using a different font to the one selected. Internet Explorer seems to do this too, but to a much lesser extent.

There are two sections presented below to test characters in the Shavian block:

• The first section is a reproduction (with slight modifications) of the "Reading Key" from Androcles and the Lion.
   
• The second section is simply the list of Shavian codepoints and is laid out in a grid format for easy comparison against the online Unicode charts.
  • Placing your cursor over any of the characters in the chart shows the codepoint and its name from the Unicode Character Database (Copyright © 1991-2006 Unicode, Inc). This may not work with some browsers.

The Shaw Alaphabet Reading Key
The letters are classified as Tall, Deep, Short, and Compound.
Beneath each letter is its full name: its sound is shown in bold type.

The four most frequent words are represented by single letters: the U1045E, of U1045D, and U1046F, to U10451.
Proper names may be distinguished by a preceding 'Namer' dot: e.g. U00B7 U1046E U10474 U10465, Rome.
Punctuation and numerals are unchanged. Learn the alphabet in pairs, as listed for Writers overleaf (not shown).

Shavian [10450-1047F]