Within the context of Tolkien's fictional world, the Tengwar were invented by the Elf Fëanor, and used first to write the Elvish languages Quenya and Telerin.

Later a great number of Tolkien's constructed languages were written using the Tengwar, including Sindarin.

Within the context of Tolkien's fictional world, the Tengwar were invented by the Elf Fëanor in Valinor, and used first to write the Elven tongues Quenya and Telerin.

According to J. R. R. Tolkien's The War of the Jewels, at the time Fëanor created his script, he introduced a change in terminology.

The letters of the earlier alphabet native to Sindarin were called cirth (singular certh, probably from *kirte "cutting", and thus semantically analogous to Quenya sarat).

There are only a few known samples predating publication of The Lord of the Rings (many of them published posthumously): The following samples presumably predate the Lord of the Rings, but were not explicitly dated: The most notable characteristic of the Tengwar script is that the shapes of the letters correspond to the distinctive features of the sounds they represent.

The Quenya consonant system has five places of articulation: labial, dental, palatal, velar, and glottal.

The velars distinguish between plain and labialized (that is, articulated with rounded lips, or followed by a [w] sound).

Each point of articulation, and the corresponding tengwa series, has a name in the classical Quenya mode.

Palatal sounds are called Tyelpetéma and have no tengwa series of their own, but are represented by column III letters with an added diacritic for following [j].

Each series is headed by the basic signs composed of a vertical stem descending below the line, and a single bow.

An example from the parmatéma (the signs with a closed bow on the right side) in the "general use" of the Tengwar is: In languages such as Quenya, which do not contain any voiced fricatives other than "v", the raised stem + doubled bow row is used for the common nasal+stop sequences (nt, mp, nk, nqu).

Since the publication of the first official description of the Tengwar at the end of The Lord of the Rings, others have created modes for other languages such as English, Spanish, German, Swedish, French, Finnish, Italian, Hungarian and Welsh.

This implies a major flaw: If no corresponding Tengwar font is installed, a string of nonsense characters appears.

[20] Tengwar are included in the unofficial ConScript Unicode Registry (CSUR), which assigns codepoints in the Private Use Area.

[30] Footballers such as Sergio Agüero[31] and Fernando Torres[32] have tattoos with their first name in Tengwar on their forearms.

For a list of linguistic material by Tolkien published in the journals Parma Eldalamberon and Vinyar Tengwar, see bibliography in Elvish languages (Middle-earth).