Deseret Small Letter Tee

It is Deseret’s lowercase letter for the English “t” sound.

Brigham Young announced the project to Utah’s legislature on December 13, 1853, and the Deseret News showed the letters publicly on January 19, 1854. The shapes changed during the 1850s; printed books in the late 1860s used a settled version.

Unicode 16.0 (2024) uses forms based on a second printing typeface commissioned by the Church. Earlier fonts and teaching materials show other shapes, so an old scan may look different.

Why was the Deseret alphabet created?

To make English easier to read and teach through sound-based spelling.

Brigham Young, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the University of Deseret’s regents wanted children and immigrant converts to learn English without memorizing its irregular spellings. They also hoped a shared writing system would help unite their growing Utah community.

The project drew on a wider spelling-reform movement associated with Isaac Pitman, an English educator who devised sound-based writing systems. After considering one of Pitman’s alphabets, the regents chose custom characters. George D. Watt, a note-taker trained in Pitman’s shorthand, designed much of the new set. Missionaries later used Deseret letters in word lists for Hopi and Shoshone, two Indigenous languages.

Was the Deseret alphabet a secret code?

It was publicly promoted, though some outsiders suspected secrecy.

In 1859, a New York newspaper speculated that the Latter-day Saints’ alphabet might keep outsiders from reading church affairs. The Deseret News reported the suspicion and noted that leaders had published the alphabet’s key. Its unfamiliar letters could look exclusionary to outsiders, even though the script was promoted for teaching.