Standard Galactic Alphabet Translator

Is the enchanting table swearing at you? Nope, but I get why you'd ask. This galactic alphabet translator settles it. Symbols in, English out. Works backwards too.

How Do You Read the Minecraft Enchanting Table?

Letter by letter, with the chart below. Each symbol is one English letter, so it's a swap and nothing fancier. Bad news, though. The words are random, pulled from a fixed list every time an item goes on the table, so decoding them won't tell you a thing about the spell you'll get. The list has some weird ones in it. Cthulhu's in there. So is xyzzy. Sharpness III isn't. By hand, it's slow. Screenshot it, zoom way in, then squint. Figure a minute a line.

The Standard Galactic Alphabet, Copy and Paste

Unicode never gave Galactic its own block, so these are stand-ins borrowed from Canadian syllabics, Japanese katakana, the Vai script of Liberia and a pile of math symbols. Ugly fix. But everyone copies these exact ones, so yours will match. Boxes instead of letters just mean a missing font. Paste it anyway.

Letter	Galactic	Letter	Galactic
A	ᔑ	N	リ
B	ʖ	O	𝙹
C	ᓵ	P	!¡
D	↸	Q	ᑑ
E	ᒷ	R	∷
F	⎓	S	ᓭ
G	⊣	T	ℸ ̣
H	⍑	U	⚍
I	╎	V	⍊
J	⋮	W	∴
K	ꖌ	X	̇/
L	ꖎ	Y	||
M	ᒲ	Z	⨅

Words in Galactic, Straight From the Tool

English	Galactic
hello	⍑ᒷꖎꖎ𝙹
Steve	ᓭℸ ̣ᒷ⍊ᒷ
creeper	ᓵ∷ᒷᒷ!¡ᒷ∷
Herobrine	⍑ᒷ∷𝙹ʖ∷╎リᒷ
diamond sword	↸╎ᔑᒲ𝙹リ↸ ᓭ∴𝙹∷↸
I love you	╎ ꖎ𝙹⍊ᒷ ||𝙹⚍

Every row in that table came straight out of the box above, so if your own Steve looks a bit different, it's a font on your phone drawing one of the symbols in its own style.

Where You'll See It

Minecraft first. Put a sword on the table and three lines of it pop up beside the book. Players also stick it on signs and banners in their builds. Some use it for hidden notes, because anyone who walks past sees a squiggle and only the people who know the chart can tell it says trap ahead.

Tattoo plans? Run the word through, then paste the result straight back in. Same word out? Good. A P that's lost its upside-down half reads as a plain exclamation mark, and you don't want to explain that at the pool. Ten seconds now, or forever on your arm.

Then Discord. Bios, server names, secret channels. Send your group chat one line of it and see who decodes it by hand first. Somebody will. Usually the quiet one. Then they'll reply in it, and now the two of you are stuck typing like that for a week while everyone else in the server begs for a translation.

The T That Broke Everything

English into Galactic is the easy half. Back the other way, T is the trap. Galactic's T is really three characters. Hook. Space. A dot tucked under the space. Read naively, Steve splits into s and eve, plus one orphan dot. One bad space, and a whole sentence goes to soup.

So the tool grabs the long symbols first. T, X, P and Y are two or three characters each, and it checks for those before it lets a space be a space. I ran all 26 letters both ways, plus the lazy dog pangram, before calling it done, and that pangram is a good one to try yourself, since it hits every letter of the alphabet at least once.

Numbers? Galactic doesn't have any, so 64 stays 64 and punctuation stays put. Tom Hall drew the alphabet in 1990 for Commander Keen, where it's on the exit signs on Mars. Minecraft borrowed it in 2011, and kids who've never heard of Keen still call it the enchanting table language, which would probably make Tom Hall laugh.

Into secret alphabets? Try the Wingdings Translator, with its Undertale lore. The Egyptian Hieroglyphics Translator does names in real hieroglyphs. The rest of the shelf sits on the translators page. How enchanting actually works is on the Minecraft Wiki.

Galactic Alphabet, Answered

What is the Standard Galactic Alphabet? A swap code. English letters in alien costumes. Commander Keen had it first, in 1990. Minecraft came along much later.

What does the enchanting table say? Gibberish, on purpose. Swap the item and the words reshuffle, with no clue attached about what you'll get.

Can you copy and paste the Galactic alphabet? Yes. Copy straight from the box or the chart. Discord and Instagram bios take it fine. Some fonts eat the dots on T and X. They're still there if you paste it somewhere else.

Does the Galactic alphabet have numbers? Nope. Digits stay normal. Fan fonts sometimes invent number symbols, but Tom Hall never drew any.

How do you translate Galactic to English? Paste it in. Squiggles become letters, spaces stay put, and you're reading English again in under a second.

Is the Galactic alphabet from Star Wars? No. That's Aurebesh, with totally different shapes. People mix them up because both look like they came from space.