The Shavian alphabet (/ˈʃeɪviən/ SHAY-vee-ən; also known as the Shaw alphabet) is a constructed alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonemic orthography for the English language to replace the inefficiencies and difficulties of conventional spelling using the Latin alphabet. It was posthumously funded by and named after the playwright George Bernard Shaw and designed by Ronald Kingsley Read, a professional signwriter and letterer.

Shaw set three main criteria for the new alphabet:

The Shavian alphabet consists of three types of letters: tall (with an ascender), deep (with a descender) and short. All vowels but the consonant–vowel ligature yew are short. Among consonants, the short letters are liquids (r, l) and nasals (m, n); these, the semivowels (y, w) and the heng letters (h, ng) are derived from each other through rotation or reflection. Tall letters are voiceless consonants, excepting Yea 𐑘 and Hung 𐑙. A tall letter rotated 180°, with the tall part now extending below the baseline, becomes a deep letter, representing the corresponding voiced consonants (except Haha 𐑣). These rotation pairs, with the exception of the heng consonants, are the same letters that are paired in Pitman shorthand. Affricates, several diphthongs, and rhotic vowels are ligatures. The alphabet is therefore to some extent featural.

There are no separate uppercase or lowercase letters as in the Latin script; instead of using capitalization to mark proper nouns, a "namer-dot" (·) is placed before a name. Sentences are typically not started with a namer-dot, unless it is otherwise called for. All other punctuation and word spacing is similar to conventional orthography.

Each character in the Shavian alphabet requires only a single stroke to be written on paper. The writing utensil needs to be lifted up only once when writing each character, thus enabling faster overall writing than Latin script.

Spelling in Androcles follows the phonemic distinctions of Received Pronunciation except for explicitly indicating vocalic "r" with the above ligatures. Most dialectal variations of English pronunciation can be regularly produced from this spelling, but those who do not make certain distinctions, particularly in the vowels, find it difficult to produce the canonical spellings spontaneously. For instance, most North American dialects merge 𐑭 /ɑː/ and 𐑪 /ɒ/ (the father–bother merger), though standard English orthography is a guide.

There is no ability to indicate word stress, so billow /ˈbɪloʊ/ and below /bɪˈloʊ/ are both spelled 𐑚𐑦𐑤𐑴, and diploid /ˈdɪplɔɪd/ and deployed /dɪˈplɔɪd/ are both spelled 𐑛𐑦𐑐𐑤𐑶𐑛. However, in most cases the reduction of unstressed vowels is sufficient to distinguish word pairs that are distinguished only by stress in spoken discourse. For instance, the noun convict /ˈkɒnvɪkt/ and the verb convict /kənˈvɪkt/ can be spelled 𐑒𐑪𐑯𐑝𐑦𐑒𐑑 ˈkɒnvɪkt and 𐑒𐑩𐑯𐑝𐑦𐑒𐑑 kənvɪkt, respectively.

Additionally, five common words are abbreviated as single letters. The words the (𐑞), of (𐑝), and (𐑯), to (𐑑), and for (𐑓) are written with the single letters indicated.