In 1842, a professor named Auguste Thibaudin proposed swapping vowels for numbers ... Or 40 tude D vine. In short: We’ve been playing with letters, numbers and abbreviations for centuries.

Try your hand at this verse from 1867: Or 40 tude D vine. In short: We’ve been playing with letters, numbers and abbreviations for centuries. The only difference is now, thanks to technology ...

David Corbett redrew some Arabic glyphs for consistency. Most of these are minor changes to baseline, i‘jam positioning, or making a derived letter match its origin letter. Code points: U+0625, U+0634 ...