What Is the Pigpen Cipher?
The pigpen cipher, also called the Masonic cipher, hides letters behind fragments of grids. This guide explains the three grids and how each letter gets its symbol.
What is the Pigpen Cipher?
Pigpen Cipher replaces each letter with a glyph drawn from the classic pigpen grids. Letters from the first grid use corner and side shapes, letters from the second grid add a dot, and letters from the final grid use diagonal shapes, so the result looks like a secret symbol message.
How to use it
- Type or paste your message into the box.
- Click Encode.
- Copy the glyph message.
Worked example
For 'hello', the output is '┴├└•└•┤•'.
Is pigpen hard to decode without the key?
Not once you know the grids, because the mapping is fixed and the shapes reveal the grid structure. Its charm is visual secrecy at a glance, not cryptographic strength.
Frequently asked questions
Why do some glyphs have a dot?
The dot marks letters from the second pigpen grid, which reuses the first grid's shapes with a dot added to keep every letter distinct.
Do spaces survive encoding?
Yes. Spaces and other non-letters pass through unchanged, so word breaks stay visible in the glyph message.