How it works
Spelling by sound
Shavian is a 48-letter alphabet commissioned under George Bernard Shaw's will, with one letter per sound of English. Each word is looked up in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, and each of its sounds (written in ARPAbet) becomes one Shavian letter: HH AH0 L OW1 for hello gives 𐑣𐑩𐑤𐑴.
A few rules follow common Shavian practice: an unstressed schwa is ado (𐑩) and a stressed one up (𐑳); Y followed by UW becomes the single letter yew (𐑿); the, of, and, to and for take their one-letter short forms; and a list of words where the dictionary's American vowel differs (father, palm, drama) uses ah (𐑭).
Two dictionaries, and guesses
The 7,500 most common words load first (360 KB), so the tool works at once; the full dictionary of about 125,000 words (5.4 MB) follows in the background and replaces any guesses. A word that is in neither is guessed from its spelling with simple rules (tion, ight, silent e and so on) and shown with a dotted underline.
Fixing a word
Press a word to open it letter by letter. A letter can be swapped for its voiced or voiceless pair (𐑐 and 𐑚) or for any other vowel, a letter can be added before or after it, or removed. A word can also take a namer dot · for a proper name, or an acroring ⸰ or acroarc ꤮ for initialisms and acronyms. Edits stay on the word while you keep typing elsewhere.
Save image draws the text as a PNG with each word's English spelling, its Shavian and its IPA, using the Noto Sans Shavian font.
