Comparative Lexicon of the Deseret Alphabet

Explore Deseret Spellings in Original Sources

What is the Comparative Lexicon?

The Comparative Lexicon of the Deseret Alphabet is built on resources transcribed by the Illinois Deseret Consortium, including scripture passages from the Deseret News, the Deseret First Book, the Deseret Second Book, and the 1869 Book of Mormon—with more texts coming soon.

Because Deseret was a phonetic alphabet based on Isaac Pitman’s English Phonotypic Alphabet, texts written in Deseret offer the closest thing we have to an audio recording of early Utah English. Although many spellings reflect influences beyond pronunciation—often typographic quirks rather than phonetic intent—they still offer rare and valuable glimpses into the spoken language of Utah’s Latter-day Saint pioneers.

The lexicon serves several audiences. For linguists, it offers evidence for historical sound change, transcription practices, and orthographic variation. For historians, it shows how early Latter-day Saints used writing to shape communal identity. For general readers, it makes nineteenth-century English newly visible: familiar in vocabulary, but strikingly different in sound and script. For artists, designers, and other makers, it provides historically attested Deseret spellings, allowing creative work to draw on documented nineteenth-century usage rather than guesses based on modern pronunciation.

The Comparative Lexicon ultimately aims to include all words and spelling variants contained in the Deseret Alphabet corpus.

Selected Entries

In the table below, you can learn how early Mormons might have pronounced common words like covenants and less common ones like cureloms and cumoms. Here, words are given in Deseret as well as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Explore thousands of other entries in the most current version of the Comparative Lexicon of the Deseret Alphabet, first launched in September 2025.