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The term TOBI has come to be used in two different ways. Originally, it was the name of an annotation system, developed in the period 1991 to 1994, which was designed for use in labelling intonation and prosody in databases of spoken Mainstream American English (Beckman and Hirschberg 1994). Very quickly, however, it also came to refer to a general framework for the development of prosodic annotation systems in other varieties of English (eg Mayo et al. 1997 [Glasgow]) and in other languages (eg Grice et al. 1996 [German]; Venditti 1997 [Japanese]). In this chapter, we will try to identify the essential properties of a TOBI framework annotation system by describing the development and design of the original ToBI conventions. In this description, we will overview the general phonological theory and the specific theory of Mainstream American English intonation and prosody that we decided to incorporate in the original ToBI tags. We will also state the practical principles that led us to make the decisions that we did. Before we begin, however, we should explain a practical terminological decision. Although the original ToBI for Mainstream American English (MAE) is the most completely developed of the ToBI-framework systems, and also the system most completely tested by use, the development of ToBI-framework systems for other languages makes this dual usage increasingly awkward. Therefore, we will adopt the following convention for distinguishing the two uses in this chapter. We will reserve the unmodified term" ToBI'for the developmental framework, and use the prefixed term'MAE_TOBI'for the original system. The chapter is …