Merrill Shorthand is a shorthand system invented by Albert H. Merrill, published in 1942.
The system is described in Merrill's book as "A shorthand system built on an original principle of connecting consonant-indicating positions by vowel-indicating curves and straight lines." The system differs from Boyd's Syllabic Shorthand, which is another system which attempts to use a syllabic basis, in a number of ways:
The vowels are grouped into five sets:
The consonants are grouped into three sets, "left," "right," and "extreme right." The extreme right consonants are used only to end syllables, not to begin them. When a right consonant "begins" a syllable, a space is put before it which is absent when the consonant is in the left group. The "ending" consonant of the syllable controls how far rightward the stroke that represents the syllable is extended: thus "lad" is a straight line from the highest position to the writing line, only slightly rightward, while "lawn" has a stroke that runs between the same heights, but with a larger forward dimension. The positions are as follows:
The parenthesized entries are represented by shaded strokes.
A later edition was published in 1945 under the title "Merrill's Modernized Shorthand."