It was posthumously funded by and named after Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and designed by Ronald Kingsley Read.

It should be: The Shavian alphabet consists of three types of letters: tall (with an ascender), deep (with a descender) and short.

There are no separate uppercase or lowercase letters as in the Latin script; instead of using capitalization to mark proper nouns, a "namer-dot" (·) is placed before a name.

Spelling in Androcles follows the phonemic distinctions of Received Pronunciation except for explicitly indicating vocalic "r" with the above ligatures.

For instance, most North American dialects merge 𐑭 /ɑː/ and 𐑪 /ɒ/ (the father–bother merger), though standard English orthography is a guide.

The words the (𐑞), of (𐑝), and (𐑯), to (𐑑), and often for (𐑓) are written with the single letters indicated.

Shaw had served from 1926 to 1939 on the BBC's Advisory Committee on Spoken English, which included several exponents of phonetic writing.

However, he found its limitations frustrating as well and realized that it was not a suitable replacement for traditional orthography, making the production of printed material difficult and impossible to type.

Following Shaw's death in November 1950, and after some legal dispute, the Trustee announced a worldwide competition to design such an alphabet, with the aim of producing a system that would be an economical way of writing and of printing the English language.

This is often assumed to be a clerical error introduced in the rushed printing of the Shavian edition of Androcles and the Lion.

Both sides of the debate have suggested other reasons, including associations with various styles of Latin letters (namely, the ⟨g⟩ in ⟨-ing⟩, often written with a bottom-loop in script) and the effect of letter-height on the coastlines of words, but whether Read considered any of these is uncertain.

Either he always intended that letter shape or he thought it best to leave things as they were, especially as a corrected ⟨ng⟩ in hasty or careless writing might be confused with Hung "𐑣".

[8] Though the shape of Air "𐑺" /ɛər/ suggests a derivation from Ado "𐑩" /ə/ + Ado "𐑩" /ə/ + Roar "𐑮" /r/ (which would give /ɜːr/), its name suggests a derivation either from Egg "𐑧" /ɛ/ + Ado "𐑩" /ə/ + Roar "𐑮" /r/ (reflecting the conservative pronunciation [ɛər]) or from Egg "𐑧" /ɛ/ + Egg "𐑧" /ɛ/ + Roar "𐑮" /r/ (reflecting the contemporary pronunciation [ɛːr]).

In contrast, the name of Err "𐑻" /ɜːr/ suggests a derivation from Ado "𐑩" /ə/ + Ado "𐑩" /ə/ + Roar "𐑮" /r/ (which would suggest "𐑺"), both because the closest short approximation of the conservative pronunciation [ɜː] is [ə] and because the contemporary pronunciation is [əː].

An adaptation of Shavian to another language, Esperanto, was developed by John Wesley Starling; though not widely used, at least one booklet has been published with transliterated sample texts.