From religion to literacy, from parliaments to business, the aim of this paper is to revive the worlds of shorthand from the sixteenth century onwards, highlighting the many issues at play in the formal and social characteristics of this art (or technology). Comparing Britain and France, the aim is to consider the plas- ticity of shorthand systems, how their meanings and uses varied over time and place, and how they could shape cultural and political forms. Shorthand was suc-cessively (and sometimes simultaneously) knowledge and art, language and sci- ence, and educational and commercial technology. This paper begins with the uniqueness of an art that was initially only British (for two centuries) before de- veloping on the European continent. It analyses in detail specific features of a culture that combined proto-phonetics, the study of the English language, and the lived and textual experience of Puritanism. It then focuses on the use of short- hand in Britain and France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when it became a legal and parliamentary technology. It reveals two different national traditions and ways of using and promoting journalism and in extenso reporting based on shorthand to ensure the publicity of debates and the regime of opinion. Finally, it examines the educational and commercial actualisations of shorthand – its growing popularity in Britain (with Isaac Pitman) and France (with Émile Duployé) as an educational technology for the people in the mid nineteenth century, and as a tool for business in the late nineteenth century. All this points to short- hand as a technology that contributed to the achievement of completeness, truth, and accuracy in the legal, political, and, subsequently, economic spheres.