Cipher Translator

This cipher translator doesn't ask which cipher you've got, because most people staring at a scrap of code from an escape room in Tulsa have no clue. Paste it. Out comes Atbash, then ROT13 and ROT47, then it's backwards, A1Z26, Pigpen, and one Caesar shift for luck. And if the box can read your text as coded English, the answer lands on top. Try svool dliow.

How Do You Translate a Cipher to English?

Try them all. Whichever line stops looking like a cat walked across the keys, that's your answer. That's all this does, only faster than you'd manage on a napkin. Twenty-eight tries, one paste. Each try gets marked on common words, with letter frequency as the tie-breaker, and the best line moves up top.

Coded line I tried	Top line in the box	Cipher it found
svool dliow	hello world	Atbash
gsv jfrxp yildm ulc	the quick brown fox	Atbash
Gsv kzhhdliw rh xlxlmfg	The password is coconut	Atbash
uryyb jbeyq	hello world	ROT13
Zrrg zr ng gur byq bnx gerr	Meet me at the old oak tree	ROT13
Khoor Zruog	Hello World	Caesar, shift 3
Wklv lv d whvw	This is a test	Caesar, shift 3
dlrow olleh	hello world	Reversed
eerht ta em teem	meet me at three	Reversed
w6==@ (@C=5	Hello World	ROT47
8-5-12-12-15 23-15-18-12-4	hello world	A1Z26

Which Ciphers Does It Do?

Seven. Atbash and ROT13 are the famous pair. ROT47, reverse, A1Z26, Pigpen and Caesar fill out the bench. Geocachers and Gravity Falls fans keep running into these, and none of them wants a password.

Cipher	The idea	hello becomes
Atbash	Alphabet flipped, A is Z	svool
ROT13	Slide 13 letters	uryyb
ROT47	Slide 47 places, symbols too	96==@
Reverse	Back to front	olleh
A1Z26	Letters to numbers	8-5-12-12-15
Pigpen	Letters to grid shapes	⊓ □ ⌞· ⌞· ⊏·
Caesar	Slide 3 letters	khoor

Got a Caesar message with some other shift? It still gets cracked here. For the full list of 25, our Caesar cipher translator prints every one. Numbers only? The A1Z26 translator has more on that code, including why Gravity Falls fans know it by heart.

What Is the Atbash Cipher?

It's the alphabet folded in half. A meets Z. B meets Y. Hebrew scribes got there first, so the name is four Hebrew letters in a row: aleph, tav, bet, shin. First, last, second, second to last. Flip open Jeremiah and you'll hit Sheshach, a place no map has, and scholars read it as Babylon in disguise. Same tool both ways, too. Run a coded line through and you're back at the start, so there's no key to lose.

Pigpen Cipher Translator, and the Cheat I Had to Use

Pigpen isn't letters. Each one is a piece of a tic-tac-toe grid, a pen around a pig, and Freemasons wrote with it for so long that people still call it the Masonic cipher. Unicode has no Pigpen alphabet, though. So I borrowed box shapes from math symbols, and a dot after the shape stands in for the dot that belongs inside it. Paste that output back and it'll decode. On paper, you'd draw the dot in the middle.

Variations exist, so if your treasure map won't decode, the mapmaker may have laid out the grid in another order.

How I Broke the Best Guess

My first version would've embarrassed itself. I typed "Don't panic, 42!" in plain English, and it announced a best guess of "Its'y ufsnh," all because "its" is a real word and that was enough proof for the old rule. Same rule I'd used on the Caesar page, with 28 tries in place of 25, and more tries meant more lucky junk. Now real words have to cover half the letters in short text before anything earns the top line.

That has a cost. "Qrne qvnel" is ROT13 for Dear diary, and neither word sits in my list, so you get no guess at all. The answer's still there on the ROT13 line. You'll just have to read it yourself, and I'd take that over a confident wrong answer.

Which Ciphers Can't It Crack?

Anything with a key. Vigenère needs its keyword, so all seven lines come out as junk. Enigma machines changed their wiring with every letter typed, and it took Bletchley Park, Alan Turing and a room of electromechanical bombes to get through that. A web page in a browser tab won't be doing the same on your lunch break, so skip the searches for an enigma code translator here. Modern encryption like AES is further out still. It isn't a puzzle at all, just math built so nobody gets in without the key, and there's a good reason your bank trusts it.

Foreign text will trip it up too, since it only scores English. Have a look at the Atbash history if the old stuff is your thing, or move over to Morse and binary, which are codes rather than ciphers. More live on the translators page.

Cipher Questions Folks Ask

What's the difference between a cipher and a code? Size, roughly. Ciphers mess with letters. Codes swap a whole word, like a spy saying "the eagle has landed" down a bad phone line. Old movies mix the two up constantly.

Is cypher or cipher the right spelling? Both. Americans mostly go with the i. The y is older, and rappers kept it, since a cypher is also a circle of freestylers trading bars on a corner in the Bronx.

How do I know which cipher my message uses? Paste it here first. No luck? Go hunting. Numbers under 27? A1Z26. Little boxes? Pigpen. Did the double l in hello stay double in the code? Then somebody did a plain swap, Atbash or Caesar.

Is ROT13 the same as a Caesar cipher? Yes. Shift 13, exactly half of 26. Do it twice and you're home again, which is why Usenet regulars loved it for hiding movie endings back in the dial-up days.

Can a cipher translator decode any cipher? No. Seven here, none with keys. A long random key can't be guessed by anybody honest, so if some site promises to decode everything, check what it's selling.

What's the easiest cipher for kids? Pigpen, I'd say. An eight-year-old can draw the key in a minute, and it looks properly secret on a note passed in class at any school in Ohio.