Our Approach to Spelling
The Deseret Alphabet has never had a universally accepted spelling standard. Its phonetic design makes variation especially apparent: speakers pronounce words differently, perceive and analyze sounds differently, and sometimes disagree about how Deseret words should be spelled.
In the present exercise, our immediate goal is narrower: learning to write according to the conventions of the longest published Deseret Alphabet text, the 1869 Book of Mormon (BoM69). This is necessarily a conservative, even antiquarian approach, but in the absence of an accepted standard, that text offers a useful starting point. Its spellings can make a historical variety of English seem vividly present, though we cannot assume that they faithfully record how Deseret writers actually spoke. Nor do we intend to prescribe how everyone should use the alphabet today. Those choices belong to the people who use it.
Learning these conventions also provides useful preparation for reading the major printed Deseret publications: BoM69 and the Deseret First Book and Deseret Second Book of 1868, which follow largely similar spelling conventions.
Begin with a worked example and guided practice, or go directly to a ten-word quiz. Each quiz has five easy, three moderate, and two difficult words. A perfect first-attempt score unlocks three Book of Mormon proper names, which in many cases require familiarity with the original Deseret Alphabet text.
How answers are checked: reproduce an accepted BoM69 reference form, including its capitalization. Each exact match earns one point. On this quiz, an โincorrectโ answer simply differs from the spelling attested in BoM69. It does not mean your pronunciation or preferred Deseret spelling is wrong.
A Worked Example: book
Listen for three sounds: b, the vowel in foot, and k. They correspond to ๐บ ยท ๐ณ ยท ๐ฟ.
The BoM69 form is ๐บ๐ณ๐ฟ. The English sequence oo represents one vowel here, so it takes one Deseret letter.
On the IDC keyboard, the physical keys Q, 6, and G produce these characters.
Spell in Deseret:
Type the key labels or click the keys; Shift selects capitals and Alt/Option selects numbers and symbols. On narrow screens, scroll the keyboard sideways. About this keyboard.
Sound reference (guided practice)
Keep Reading and Writing
Keep studying how to read, how to write, and how to type in the Deseret Alphabet. Consider variation in nineteenth-century Deseret Alphabet spellings by browsing the Comparative Lexicon and reading the Deseret News scripture passages, among our other transcribed texts. You might also like our Deseret typing game.