India Devanagari (/ˌdeɪvəˈnɑːɡəri/ DAY-və-NAH-gə-ree;[6] देवनागरी, IAST: Devanāgarī, Sanskrit pronunciation: [deːʋɐˈnaːɡɐriː]) is an Indic script used in the Indian subcontinent.

[10] The Devanāgarī script, composed of 48 primary characters, including 14 vowels and 34 consonants,[11] is the fourth most widely adopted writing system in the world,[12][13] being used for over 120 languages.

[15] It is written from left to right, has a strong preference for symmetrical rounded shapes within squared outlines, and is recognisable by a horizontal line, known as a शिरोरेखा śirorekhā, that runs along the top of full letters.

[8] Among the languages using it as a primary or secondary script are Marathi, Pāḷi, Sanskrit,[16] Hindi,[17] Boro, Nepali, Sherpa, Prakrit, Apabhramsha, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj Bhasha,[18] Chhattisgarhi, Haryanvi, Magahi, Nagpuri, Rajasthani, Khandeshi, Bhili, Dogri, Kashmiri, Maithili, Konkani, Sindhi, Nepal Bhasa, Mundari, Angika, Bajjika and Santali.

Devanāgarī is part of the Brahmic family of scripts of India, Nepal, Tibet, and Southeast Asia.

Some of the earliest epigraphic evidence attesting to the developing Sanskrit Nāgarī script in ancient India is from the 1st to 4th century CE inscriptions discovered in Gujarat.

[7][10] The use of Sanskrit in Nāgarī script in medieval India is attested by numerous pillar and cave-temple inscriptions, including the 11th-century Udayagiri inscriptions in Madhya Pradesh,[27] and an inscribed brick found in Uttar Pradesh, dated to be from 1217 CE, which is now held at the British Museum.

[28] The script's prototypes and related versions have been discovered with ancient relics outside India, in places such as Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Indonesia.

In East Asia, the Siddhaṃ matrika script (considered as the closest precursor to Nāgarī) was in use by Buddhists.

[16] It has long been used traditionally by religiously educated people in South Asia to record and transmit information, existing throughout the land in parallel with a wide variety of local scripts (such as Moḍī, Kaithi, and Mahajani) used for administration, commerce, and other daily uses.

An early version of Devanāgarī is visible in the Kutila inscription of Bareilly dated to VS 1049 (992 CE), which demonstrates the emergence of the horizontal bar to group letters belonging to a word.

[31] In Sinja Valley, mid-western Nepal where the Nepali language originates from, the earliest examples of the Devanagari script from the 13th century were found on the cliffs and in nearby Dullu.

[33] Other scripts closely related to Nāgarī (such as Siddhaṃ) were introduced throughout East and Southeast Asia from the 7th to the 10th centuries CE: notably in Indonesia, Vietnam, and Japan.

[38] The Ligor and the Kalasan inscriptions of central Java, dated to the 8th century, are also in the Nāgarī script of north India.

According to the epigraphist and Asian Studies scholar Lawrence Briggs, these may be related to the 9th century copper plate inscription of Devapaladeva (Bengal) which is also in early Devanāgarī script.

According to anthropologists and Asian studies scholars John Norman Miksic and Goh Geok Yian, the 8th century version of early Nāgarī or Devanāgarī script was adopted in Java, Bali, and Khmer around the 8th–9th centuries, as evidenced by the many contemporaneous inscriptions of this period.

[40]The letter order of Devanāgarī, like nearly all Brāhmic scripts, is based on phonetic principles that consider both the manner and place of articulation of the consonants and vowels they represent.

The end of a full verse may be marked with a double-daṇḍa, a "[॥] Error: {{Lang}}: Latn text/non-Latn script subtag mismatch (help)" symbol.

These include Akshar,[65] Annapurna,[66] Arial,[67] CDAC-Gist Surekh,[68] CDAC-Gist Yogesh,[69] Chandas,[70] Gargi,[71] Gurumaa,[72] Jaipur,[73] Jana,[74] Kalimati,[75] Kanjirowa,[76] Lohit Devanagari, Mangal,[77] Kokila,[78] ,Preeti,[79] Raghu,[80] Sanskrit2003,[81] Santipur OT,[82] Siddhanta, and Thyaka.

Santipur OT is a beautiful font reflecting a very early [medieval era] typesetting style for Devanagari.

IAST is the de facto standard used in printed publications, like books, magazines, and electronic texts with Unicode fonts.

It is similar to Velthuis system and was created by Avinash Chopde to help print various Indic scripts with personal computers.

This difficulty is avoided with the system developed in 1996 by Frans Velthuis for TeX, loosely based on IAST, in which case is irrelevant.

While some people use InScript, the majority uses either Google phonetic transliteration or the input facility Universal Language Selector provided on Wikipedia.

The Ubuntu Linux operating system supports several keyboard layouts for Devanāgarī, including Harvard-Kyoto, WX notation, Bolanagari and phonetic.

Thousands of manuscripts of ancient and medieval era Sanskrit texts in Devanāgarī have been discovered since the 19th century.