It was created by William Stokoe for American Sign Language (ASL), with Latin letters and numerals used for the shapes they have in fingerspelling, and iconic glyphs to transcribe the position, movement, and orientation of the hands.

It was first published as the organizing principle of Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf (1960),[2] and later also used in A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles, by Stokoe, Casterline, and Croneberg (1965).

The notation is arranged linearly on the page and can be written with a typewriter that has the proper font installed.

Unlike SignWriting or the Hamburg Notation System, it is based on the Latin alphabet and is phonemic, being restricted to the symbols needed to meet the requirements of ASL (or extended to BSL, etc.)

This contrasts with SignWriting, which is written vertically from top to bottom (plus partially free two-dimensional placement of components within the writing of a single sign).

Stokoe coined the terms tab ("tabula" or sign location), dez ("designator" or handshape & orientation), and sig ("signation" or motion & action).

A serious deficiency of the system is that it does not provide for facial expression, mouthing, eye gaze, and body posture, as Stokoe had not worked out their phonemics in ASL.

[6] Verbal inflection and non-lexical movement is awkward to notate, and more recent analyses such as those of Ted Supalla have contradicted Stokoe's set of motion phonemes.

[citation needed] There is also no provision for representing the relationship between signs in their natural context, which restricts the usefulness of the notation to the lexical or dictionary level.

In the tables below, the first column is a web-based approximation of the Stokoe symbol using the inventory available in Unicode, and the second is an ASCII substitution for the purpose of citing examples in this article.

In addition, the dez (handshape) symbols below may be used to indicate that the location is the passive hand in a specific shape.

[7] It is alphabetized under to the tab U, then by the dez V, then by the sig @; the searcher does not need to know what it means or that it is glossed with the English word snake in order to look it up.