Gurmukhi, in the traditional reading, means from the mouth of the Guru. Sikh tradition holds that Guru Angad, the second Guru, gave the script its standard form in the mid sixteenth century, during his guruship from 1539 to 1552, so that the hymns of Guru Nanak could be written in a script belonging to the community itself rather than to the Persian chancery or the Brahminical schools.
Scholars describe the work as standardisation rather than invention: the letterforms descend from the Sharada family of Kashmir and the Punjab through the mercantile shorthands called Landa, which merchants used for accounts but which were too ambiguous to record scripture reliably, since they omitted vowels. Fixing full vowel notation onto these business hands turned an aid to memory into a vessel for exact scriptural transmission.
The alphabet is ordered on the Indic phonetic grid and its first thirty-five letters give it its Punjabi name, painti, the thirty-five. Later additions of dotted letters accommodated Persian and Arabic loan sounds. Gurmukhi is an abugida of the Brahmi family: consonants carry an inherent vowel, and dependent vowel signs, nasalisation marks and subscript letters complete the system that remains in daily use for Punjabi in India today.