The Shavian alphabet consists of 48 characters: 40 basic sounds, and 8 compound ones (which are combinations of basic sounds that occur frequently in the language). The characters are divided up into three categories: Tall, Deep and Short; Tall letters stretch above Short letters, and Deep letters stretch below them.
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| peep | tot | kick | fee | thigh | so | sure | church | yea | hung | |
| Deep: | |
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| bib | dead | gag | vow | they | zoo | measure | judge | woe | ha-ha | |
| Short: | |
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| loll | mime | if | egg | ash | ado | on | wool | out | ah | |
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| roar | nun | eat | age | ice | up | oak | ooze | oil | awe | |
| Compound: | |
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| are | or | air | err | array | ear | Ian | yew | |||
From the character table above, one important thing can be seen: 'talls' are generally unvoiced consonants (where the vocal chords don't vibrate when you say them), 'deeps' are generally voiced consonants (where the vocal chords do vibrate) and 'shorts' are either vowels or soft consonants. If you compare the 'peep' and 'bib' characters, you will notice that the latter is a 180-degree rotation of the former; look along the rest of the characters in the top two rows, and you will observe a similar relationship in each of the pairs. Now compare the third and fourth rows; even though they are all the same height and are not all rotations, if you look closely enough you can indeed see (mostly subtle) relations between them. This makes learning and reading the alphabet far simpler than with the completely illogical mess you get with the height, depth and shape of the conventional Roman characters.
The first 6 characters on the bottom row may not be understandable to many English-speaking people; in many 'received pronunciation' accents, e.g. British and Australian, 'are' is pronounced exactly the same as 'ah'. However, in North American accents (and in various others), wherever there is an 'r' in the written language, it is heard in the spoken language; hence the first six compound letters are easily understandable to those people who speak all their 'r's. Because Shavian is designed to be easily used by anyone who speaks English, these compound letters are included to allow for proper communication.
You will also notice that each character is only shown in one form, i.e. there is no 'capital' letter with a different 'small' version accompanying it; the reason for this is that there is only one Shavian character for each sound, so the first letter of sentences is no different from any of the others. With proper nouns (e.g. names of places and people), which also take capital letters in the Roman alphabet, a 'namer dot' is placed before them to mark their special status; e.g. 
(Rome), 
(Peter), etc.
Finally, to further the ecomomies in writing, the four most common words in the language are written with single letters; these are:
= the; = of; = and; = to.