How to Read Secretary Hand: A Beginner's Guide

Secretary hand is the everyday handwriting of English-speaking Europe from roughly 1500 to 1700. It is the script behind most parish registers, wills, deeds and letters of the period. This guide explains how to read secretary hand from first principles: the letterforms, the abbreviations, and the habit of reading by context that together turn an illegible page into a legible one. If old handwriting has stalled a line of your family research, this is where you start.

Learning to read secretary hand comes down to three things. The first is the letterforms that differ systematically from modern ones (the secretary e, c, r and h, and the long s). The second is the abbreviations that delete whole syllables. The third is the habit of reading by context rather than by exact spelling. It is a learnable skill, not a gift. The difficulty is structural, not a matter of messy penmanship.

That last point is worth settling before anything else. The reason a will from 1580 stops you cold is not that the scribe wrote badly. It is that the writing system itself differs from the one you know. Once you see the differences as a system, they stop being noise and become rules — and rules can be learned. This guide walks through what those rules are, in the order a beginner actually needs them. It sits within a broader set of resources on reading old handwriting and paleography that covers other hands and periods.

What secretary hand is — and what it is not

Secretary hand developed in the early sixteenth century, descending from earlier cursive business hands. It remained the dominant everyday script through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries before italic slowly displaced it. It was used across much of northern Europe, for English, German, Dutch, Welsh and Gaelic writing. That matters because the same letterforms recur across languages: the skill you build on an English will transfers, in part, to a Dutch register.

Two distinctions save beginners a great deal of confusion.

First, secretary hand is not the same as court hand. Court hand is a narrower, more angular script used specifically in English legal records from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries, and it descends from a different lineage, a gothic chancery hand. The two overlap in time, and courts used secretary hand too, so you will meet both. But if a document looks far more cramped and unfamiliar than the wills and letters around it, you may be looking at court hand, which is a separate study.

Second, secretary hand is overwhelmingly a vernacular script. This is the misconception that trips up newcomers most often. The documents you will read are in English (or German, or Dutch), not Latin. Latin appears only in formulaic patches: legal boilerplate, dating clauses, standard abbreviations. Do not expect to need Latin to read a Tudor will. You need to read early modern English written in an unfamiliar hand.

By the later seventeenth century, educated writers were blending secretary and italic letterforms into what paleographers call mixed hand. That is the transitional stage that eventually became modern handwriting. There is no clean cut-off year, so if your document sits around 1650–1700, expect a mixture. For how secretary hand fits among the other hands of the period, see our working guide to early modern paleography.

The secretary hand alphabet: start with the letterforms that differ

The single most efficient thing a beginner can do is learn the handful of letters that look nothing like their modern equivalents. Most of the alphabet is close enough to read on sight. It is a small set of troublemakers that does the damage.

The usual suspects are the secretary e, c, r and h, each of which can be startlingly unlike its modern form. Rather than memorising these in the abstract, work from an alphabet chart alongside a real manuscript. Leo Academy's free secretary hand alphabet chart sets out each letter's forms. Every form has a model letter, examples from period hands, and the letters it is most often mistaken for. Its companion, the free English secretary hand course, teaches the hand in 44 short lessons, one letter family at a time, in real scribes' hands. The Society of Genealogists guide and Cambridge's English Handwriting 1500–1700 online course pair a letter chart with graded practice manuscripts. Cambridge's lessons each come with a semi-diplomatic transcription to check yourself against, which is how the skill is built: one page at a time.

The troublemakers, letter by letter

• e. The secretary e most often appears as the reversed e. The pen runs down the back and round into a loop, so the letter looks like a backwards e or a Greek theta. A closed reversed e is easily read as o, and its loop is the same loop that builds a d. The other common form, the two-stroke e, is made of two separate curves meeting in the middle, and it can be taken for c.
• c. The classic secretary c is a short upright under a flat bar, like the lower half of a crossed t. What separates it from t is that c has no ascender.
• r. The twin-stem r is written like a 2 whose end loops forward into the next letter. Its two uprights make it look like a w or a v.
• h. The "butcher's hook" h is a small loop on a short stem that sweeps below the line and round to the left. Its tail can be taken for a y.
• d. The looped d makes its bowl first, then raises its back stroke and loops it over to the left. Because it is built like the reversed e, the two are easily confused.

The long s

The long s (ſ) is the letterform beginners most often get wrong, because it looks like an f and the mistake is easy to make.

It is a distinct form of s, used at the start of a word or in the middle, but not at the end: so ſuch and wiſh, but yes. A word-final s is the round s. The visual tell, as the Society of Genealogists guide notes, is the cross-stroke. An f normally has a bar or tick going through the stem, while the long s has, at most, a nub on the left side that does not fully cross. The Handbook's page on the long s puts it simply: the long s is made like an f without its tick. It also warns against confusing it with l and with the head loop of the secretary h. It is not an old-fashioned f; it is an s.

The long s is stubborn. It survived in manuscript hands into the second half of the nineteenth century, long after it vanished from London print around 1800. You will meet it well outside the secretary-hand period.

Learn the abbreviations, because they delete letters

The second structural difficulty is that secretary-hand writers abbreviated constantly. Their abbreviations do not merely shorten words: they delete whole letters and syllables that you are expected to supply. Miss the mark and you miss the missing letters entirely. Our guide to manuscript abbreviations and ligatures goes further. A working beginner's inventory:

• The macron (or tilde/titulus). A horizontal stroke over a vowel marks an omitted nasal, m or n. So coũent stands for convent. When you see a bar floating over a vowel, suspect a dropped m or n.
• Superscript letters signal contraction. Raising one or more letters above the line, often with a suspension mark, shortens the word: wᶜʰ is "which", wᵗʰ is "with", yoʳ is "your". Cambridge's conventions page sets out how editors expand these.
• Brevigraphs are single symbols standing for a whole syllable or word. The commonest is a p with a bar through its descender: ꝑ for per and par, so ꝑishe is parish and ꝑsone is person. A related form, ꝓ, stands for pro, and scribes often used one for the other. Other signs stand for endings such as -es and -er, or for a terminal -us.
• The Tironian et (⁊). This 7-like sign means "and". It was used in gothic hands throughout the period and is still common in Elizabethan secretary.
• Not every mark is an abbreviation. A bar, hook or raised letter can be pure decoration, one of the flourishes that save no letters at all. If the word is complete without the mark, read the word as written.

Real abbreviations are not decoration. They carry meaning, and a transcription that silently drops them has lost information from the page.

The thorn, and "Ye Olde"

One abbreviation deserves its own note because it powers a famous misconception. The thorn (þ) was the Old English letter for the th sound. In many secretary-hand forms it came to look like a y, and early printers, lacking a thorn sort in their type, substituted a y. That is the entire origin of "Ye Olde". As the history of the letter thorn records, the word was always "the", pronounced /ðə/, never "yee". When you see yᵉ or yᵗ in a manuscript, read the and that. Transcribers usually leave the abbreviation yᵗ for that as it is written rather than spelling it out. The letter had dropped out of standard English as a live phoneme by the end of the fourteenth century, but it lingered in these stock spellings for centuries.

Read by context, not by spelling

Two further habits separate a beginner who is guessing from one who is reading.

The first is the minim problem. A minim is a single short vertical stroke, and the letters i, m, n and u are all built from them. A run of minims, as in minimum, is genuinely ambiguous on the page, because the strokes are identical and only their grouping distinguishes the letters. There is no visual trick that resolves this. You resolve it by knowing what word is plausible in context. This is why fluent reading depends on expectation as much as eyesight.

The second is spelling variation. Standardised spelling is a recent convention. Before the mid-eighteenth century, the same woman could appear as Ann, Anne and An in a single document, with no error implied. Even some letters worked differently. u and v were two forms of one letter, not two letters, so vnto and haue are ordinary spellings. For genealogists this is the crucial adjustment: treat the different spellings of a name as one name. When you search an index or a transcription, try each spelling in turn, or search on the sound rather than the exact letters. Many genealogy indexes offer a sound-alike (Soundex) search for exactly this reason. And read a puzzling word aloud; the sound is often less strange than the spelling. A parish clerk who wrote Smyth one year and Smith the next was not confused, and the two can be one family. He was writing before the rule you are applying existed. Our guide to how to transcribe parish records faithfully shows how to keep those variants intact.

A practical order of work

Putting it together, the sequence a beginner should follow on any new document:

1. Date and place the hand. Is it pure secretary, or a mixed secretary-italic hand? Roughly what decade? This sets your expectations. Treat letterforms as a rough guide only. Earlier and later forms are tendencies, not rules: a writer could keep the forms he learnt young all his life, so a form alone dates a hand only roughly. Italic forms of c, e and r point later. A slanting stroke (/) used where we would put a comma is common before about 1580 and rare after 1600.
2. Read the easy words first. Transcribe what you can read on sight and leave gaps for the rest. The known words anchor the unknown ones.
3. Attack the troublesome letterforms. Bring the e, c, r, h and long s to the words you left blank.
4. Expand the abbreviations. Mark the letters you have supplied, so that your transcription stays honest about what was on the page and what you added. Our conventions for transcribing old documents set out a consistent way to do it.
5. Resolve the minims and the spelling by context. Use the surrounding text and your knowledge of the likely names and formulae. Wills help here, being largely stock phrasing; see our guide to transcribing old wills for the usual clauses.
6. Check against a model transcription where the tutorial provides one

Human paleography remains the standard for this work. Leo Academy, Cambridge and the Society of Genealogists are good places to build the skill. There is no substitute for reading pages.

Where machine transcription fits — and where it misleads

At some point the volume of material outgrows what you can transcribe by hand, and the question of software arrives. Here the beginner needs one clear warning and one honest picture of the options.

The warning concerns pasting a manuscript image into a general-purpose chatbot and accepting what comes back. Do not treat that output as ground truth. A University of Virginia Library report found that general-purpose models produce fluent, plausible-looking transcriptions that nonetheless contain errors a beginner cannot catch. Crucially, they offer no confidence flag when they meet a letterform they cannot read. This is the specific danger: the output reads correctly. General models also tend to quietly modernise what they read. A model that silently "corrects" Smyth to Smith, resolves an ambiguous minim to the modern-sounding word, or expands an abbreviation the wrong way hands you a clean paragraph with the errors buried where you will never spot them. For genealogy, where a single misread name derails a line for months, a plausible fabrication is worse than an obvious gap. (More on whether AI can read old handwriting.)

This is the problem Leo was built to solve. Leo's own model, ATR-1, is specially tuned for historical documents, handwritten and printed, in English, German, Dutch and the other languages written in the Latin alphabet. It works out of the box, with no training on your particular hand. It reads the image at high resolution, where general models scale it down, so the detail that separates a reversed e from an o is still there to read. Above all, it is trained to transcribe what is on the page rather than normalise it. It does not over-correct or silently modernise: the long s stays a long s, the macron is not quietly resolved, and Smyth stays Smyth. That keeps any errors on the surface. A mistake that gets through is the recoverable kind, a wrong letter or word you can check against the image shown beside the text, not a fluent sentence the page never said. ATR-1 also checks its own output for signs of failure. Output that looks wrong is hidden and retried automatically, and if the job still cannot succeed, your credit is refunded. For the mechanism behind the difference, see OCR and HTR for historical documents.

ATR-1 is the default, and for a hard reading you can run one of the general models from OpenAI, Google or Anthropic, from the same menu, into its own tab and compare the two against the image. Other dedicated handwriting-recognition platforms exist too. Transkribus, for instance, publishes an English secretary-hand model, Egerton: English Secretary Hand, and generally expects users to train or fine-tune a model for the best results on a given corpus.

Whatever tool you use, the discipline does not change: always correct the machine output against the original image. Software gives you a first pass. Your eye, trained on the letterforms, gives you a transcription you can trust.

The skill is worth building

The tools will keep improving (ATR-1 improves as users correct its transcriptions), but none of them removes the need to read. A machine transcription you cannot check is a machine transcription you cannot defend. For family history, a name you cannot defend is a branch you may have to prune later. Learn the secretary e and the long s. Learn to see a macron and supply the missing n. Learn to read yᵉ as the, and to treat Ann and Anne as the same woman. Leo Academy's free English secretary hand course takes you through all of it letter by letter, about five minutes a day, with the Handbook's alphabet chart and abbreviation pages beside you. Do that, and the documents that stalled your research for months become, page by page, simply things you can read.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you read secretary hand as a beginner?

Start by learning the handful of letterforms that differ systematically from modern ones: the secretary e, c, r and h, and the long s. Then learn the abbreviations that delete whole letters and syllables. Finally, build the habit of reading by context rather than exact spelling. Work from an alphabet chart, such as Leo Academy's free secretary hand alphabet chart, alongside a real manuscript. Transcribe the easy words first and leave gaps for the rest. Expand abbreviations, resolve ambiguous minims by plausible context, and check yourself against a model transcription. Leo Academy's free English secretary hand course teaches this in 44 short lessons. It is a learnable skill built one page at a time, not a gift.

Is there a free secretary hand alphabet chart?

Yes. Leo Academy's Handbook has a free secretary hand alphabet chart covering the letter forms of English secretary hand, c.1550–1700: every letter from a to z, the capitals and the joined letters, with a filter for earlier and later hands. Open a form to see its model letter, examples from period hands, and the letters it is most often mistaken for. Use it beside a real manuscript rather than memorising it in the abstract, and work through the free English secretary hand course if you want the letters taught one family at a time.

What is the difference between secretary hand and court hand?

Secretary hand is the everyday vernacular script of English-speaking Europe from roughly 1500 to 1700, used for wills, deeds, letters and parish registers. Court hand is a narrower, more angular script used specifically in English legal records from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries, and it descends from a different lineage, a gothic chancery hand. The two overlap in time, and courts used secretary hand too, so you will meet both. If a document looks far more cramped and unfamiliar than the wills and letters around it, you may be looking at court hand, which is a separate study.

Is secretary hand written in Latin?

No. Secretary hand is overwhelmingly a vernacular script, so the documents you read are in English, German, Dutch and other spoken languages, not Latin. This is the misconception that trips up newcomers most often. Latin appears only in formulaic patches: legal boilerplate, dating clauses and standard abbreviations. You do not need Latin to read a Tudor will. What you need is to read early modern English written in an unfamiliar hand. Pay attention to the letterforms and abbreviations, which make the page look harder than the language actually is.

Why does "the" look like "ye" in old handwriting?

Because of the thorn (þ), the Old English letter for the th sound. In many secretary-hand forms the thorn came to look like a y, and early printers, lacking a thorn sort in their type, substituted a y. That is the entire origin of "Ye Olde". The word was always "the", pronounced /ðə/, never "yee". When you see yᵉ or yᵗ in a manuscript, read the and that. The thorn had dropped out of standard English as a live sound by the end of the fourteenth century, but it lingered in these stock spellings for centuries.

Can AI transcribe secretary hand accurately?

A model built for historical documents can give you a strong first pass, but no model's output should be taken on trust. Leo's own model, ATR-1, is specially tuned for this task. It reads the image at high resolution and is trained to transcribe what is on the page, keeping the long s, the macron and archaic spelling rather than smoothing them away. General-purpose AI models tend to quietly modernise spelling, so Smyth can become Smith without warning. ATR-1 is built not to, and when it does make a mistake it is usually a wrong letter you can check against the image, not fluent text the page never said. On a hard passage, run a second model and compare. Whatever tool you use, always correct the output against the original image.