Articles
Longer-form pieces on the history, structure, and use of writing systems around the world — covering how scripts spread, the difference between alphabets and syllabaries, direction and layout, and what Unicode standardization means for global text.
Han Characters: The World's Largest Writing System
The Unicode standard currently encodes over 92,000 Han characters — and that count keeps rising. No other writing system comes close. Yet despite this staggering size, Han characters are the daily medium of over a billio...
How the Latin Script Conquered the World
No writing system in history has spread as far or as fast as the Latin script. Today it encodes hundreds of languages across every continent, from English and Spanish to Swahili, Vietnamese, and Turkish. Yet its origins...
Arabic Script: Writing from Right to Left
Walk through any city from Casablanca to Karachi and you will see it everywhere: the flowing, cursive strokes of the Arabic script, sweeping from right to left across shop signs, newspapers, and mobile screens. Arabic wr...
The Story of the Cyrillic Alphabet
The Cyrillic alphabet is the writing system of the Slavic world — and of much of the former Soviet sphere. From Russian and Bulgarian to Serbian and Mongolian, more than 250 million people write in Cyrillic every day. Ye...
Devanagari: Script of Sanskrit and Hindi
The horizontal bar running across the top of the letters is unmistakable. Devanagari — literally "the script of the city of the gods" — is the writing system of Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, Nepali, and dozens of other South...
Alphabets, Abjads, and Syllabaries: A Taxonomy of Writing
Not all writing systems work the same way. A child learning English discovers that letters map (more or less) to individual sounds. A child learning Japanese encounters three different writing systems simultaneously. A s...
Korean Hangul: The Designed Alphabet
Most writing systems evolved organically over centuries or millennia. Hangul did not. The Korean alphabet was deliberately invented in the fifteenth century by royal decree, and it remains one of the most elegant and sci...
Greek Script: The Ancestor of Western Writing
Without the Greek alphabet, there would be no Latin, no Cyrillic, and no Armenian. Greek made a decisive innovation around 800 BCE that no Semitic script had made: it systematically repurposed consonant letters to write...
Cuneiform: The World's Oldest Writing System
Five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, temple administrators faced a familiar problem: how do you keep track of thousands of jars of barley and hundreds of sheep across dozens of transactions? Their solution — pressing...
Egyptian Hieroglyphs: Sacred Carvings of the Nile
Of all the writing systems that have ever existed, none is more visually iconic than Egyptian hieroglyphs. The stylized eye, the seated figure, the owl, the lotus — these images have fascinated travellers, scholars, and...
How Scripts Travel: Trade, Religion, and Conquest
Writing systems rarely stay where they started. Across human history, scripts have migrated across continents, been adapted by new communities, borrowed, imposed, discarded, and revived. Understanding why scripts travel...