Devanagari did not spring from a single act of invention. It is the northern branch of the long evolution of Brahmi, the script attested in the edicts of Ashoka in the third century BCE. Through the Gupta period the letterforms rounded and systematised, passing through the stage scholars call Siddhamatrka, and by roughly the seventh to tenth centuries CE the distinctive headline-hung script now called Devanagari had taken shape in inscriptions across northern India.
The name joins deva, a god, to nagari, of the city, and is usually understood as the city script of the gods. Its design is an abugida: each consonant sign carries an inherent short a, and other vowels are marked by strokes attached above, below or beside the letter, while the shirorekha, the continuous top line, binds each word into a single visual unit. Conjunct consonants stack or fuse, giving the script its dense ligatures. Devanagari became the dominant script for Sanskrit from the medieval period onward, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was standardised for print and adopted for Hindi, Marathi and Nepali, making it today one of the most widely used scripts on earth, read by many hundreds of millions of people.