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Two curved phonetic shorthands, one of which cannot be written with a ballpoint.
Look at the stroke weights. Pitman uses thickness as information — a light and a heavy stroke of the same shape are a voiceless and a voiced consonant — so a page of Pitman has visibly thick and thin strokes and needs a pencil or a flexible nib. Gregg keeps every stroke at one weight and uses length instead, which is why it can be written with any pen and why it became dominant in the United States while Pitman held Britain.
Both are curved phonetic shorthands; one uses thickness and the other uses length.
| Pitman shorthand | Gregg shorthand | |
|---|---|---|
| Carries information in | Stroke thickness and position | Stroke length |
| Stroke weight on the page | Visibly two weights | Uniform |
| Vowels | Dots and dashes placed beside the outline | Written in sequence within the outline |
| Writes with a ballpoint | Not accurately | Yes |
| Relationship (from Symbolwise's records) | Commonly confused with Gregg shorthand — Both are curved phonetic shorthands; one uses thickness and the other uses length. | Commonly confused with Pitman shorthand — Both are curved phonetic shorthands; one uses length and the other thickness. |
Wikipedia · retrieved 2026-08-22
Tertiary reference, cited for the conventional description of a mark, its usual name and where it is encountered. Where an issuing body defines the mark, that body is cited alongside and governs.
Wikipedia · retrieved 2026-08-22
Tertiary reference, cited for the conventional description of a mark, its usual name and where it is encountered. Where an issuing body defines the mark, that body is cited alongside and governs.
Wikipedia · retrieved 2026-08-22
Tertiary reference, cited for the conventional description of a mark, its usual name and where it is encountered. Where an issuing body defines the mark, that body is cited alongside and governs.
Both are drawn as one continuous decorative stroke with a closed loop and a tail that crosses back over itself, which is why a description of the shape alone reaches both. The clef is far taller, spans a stave, and its spiral encircles one specific line — that encircled line is the note G, and it is the only reason the shape is drawn where it is.
The ampersand is a ligature of the Latin word et, still visible in some italic forms where the e and the t can be picked out. The Tironian et is a separate mark descending from a Roman shorthand, shaped like a small seven, and it is in daily public use in Ireland as the written form of 'agus'. A reader who knows only the ampersand takes the other for a numeral, which on a bilingual road sign produces a confidently wrong place name.
As punctuation the asterisk points at a footnote or marks a required field. In a filename pattern typed at a shell it matches any run of characters, including none — and the shell expands it against real filenames before the command runs, so the command never sees the pattern at all. That expansion is the part people are surprised by.
A single C in a circle asserts copyright. Two C shapes mark a Creative Commons licence — which grants specific permissions while the creator keeps their copyright. A CC badge does not put a work in the public domain, and it does not tell you what you may do on its own: the condition marks beside it carry the terms.