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.
Japanese Writing: Four Scripts in One Language
Japanese is unique among major modern languages in its routine use of four distinct writing systems simultaneously — sometimes in a single sentence. This typographic complexity is not a historical accident waiting to be...
Tibetan Script: Writing on the Roof of the World
High on the Tibetan plateau, at altitudes where most of the world's populations would struggle to breathe, Buddhist monks have been writing, copying, and illuminating manuscripts for over 1,300 years. The Tibetan script...
Armenian Script: Designed for a Nation's Soul
In 405 CE, a monk named Mesrop Mashtots emerged from years of study and prayer with a new alphabet — 36 letters precisely fitted to the sounds of the Armenian language. The Armenian script, still used today with minimal...
Georgian: A Script That Defies Classification
Tucked between the Black Sea and the Caucasus mountains, Georgia has maintained a writing tradition of extraordinary distinctiveness for over 1,500 years. The Georgian script looks like no other — its rounded, curling le...
The Brahmic Script Family of South and Southeast Asia
At first glance, Thai, Devanagari, Tibetan, and Sinhala look entirely different. But they share a common ancestor in the ancient Brahmi script of India, and a common structure: each is an abugida in which consonants carr...
Hebrew: A Script Reborn After Two Millennia
Hebrew is one of the very few languages in history to have been revived as a living vernacular after centuries of use only as a liturgical tongue. The script that encodes it — the square Hebrew alphabet developed during...
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...