Comparative Lexicon of the Deseret Alphabet

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 the Deseret was a phonetic alphabet based on Isaac Pitman’s English Phonotypic Alphabet, texts written in the 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 Mormon pioneers.

For linguists, the lexicon opens pathways for studying historical sound change and the philosophy of transcription. For historians, it shows how early Mormons used writing to build communal identity. For curious readers, it offers a vivid encounter with English that is at once familiar and strikingly different.

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

Open the Comparative Lexicon

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 the 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.