Writing Systems

Every way humans have figured out how to freeze speech onto a surface — cuneiform to Unicode.

25 posts· 3500 BCE – 2022

• Linear Elamite: cracking the script no one could read for four thousand years 2022
• Nüshu: the script women kept 2017
• Variable fonts: one file, infinite faces 2016
• Emoji join Unicode, and writing returns to pictures 2010
• UTF-8: the encoding designed on a New Jersey diner placemat 1992
• Unicode 1.0: one table for every script on earth 1991
• ASCII: the seven-bit truce that taught computers to speak 1963
• Sholes's typewriter: the machine that froze the alphabet 1868
• Morse code, or the first writing system designed by data 1844
• Pitman's shorthand, or writing faster than speech 1837
• Braille, or how six dots in two columns gave the blind a language 1824
• Gutenberg's press: forty-two lines that changed Europe 1455
• Hangul, or the alphabet that came with a user manual 1443
• Carolingian minuscule, or how a monk from York gave us lowercase letters 800 CE
• Arabic script: a king's epitaph in the Syrian desert 328 CE
• One script for all China: the Qin standardization, 221 BCE 221 BCE
• Brahmi script: from Ashoka's pillars to three billion living letters 300 BCE
• Latin alphabet: how a borrowed script conquered the world 700 BCE
• The Greek alphabet, or how borrowed consonants became the world's first vowels 800 BCE
• The Phoenician alphabet, or how twenty-two consonants built the rest 1050 BCE
• Oracle bone script, or how the Shang talked to their ancestors 1200 BCE
• The Indus Valley script, or what five signs can hide 2600 BCE
• Egyptian hieroglyphs, or how language learned to last 3100 BCE
• Cuneiform: the script that could say your name 3200 BCE
• Proto-cuneiform tokens: the first writing was a receipt 3500 BCE