Sherlock Holmes figure cipher

Dancing Men cipher

Encode words as dancing figures, or build a flagged figure sequence and decode it with a readable transcription.

01 / Encode

Text to figures

0 / 500 code points

Use ASCII letters A-Z and spaces, tabs, or line breaks. Case is ignored. Separators are collapsed and become flags on the preceding figure.

Ready to encode.

Dancing Men figures

Your figures will appear here.

Each token names one figure. A caret after a letter, such as M^, marks that figure as the end of a word.

02 / Decode

Figures to text

Enter uppercase A-Z tokens separated by ASCII spaces, tabs, or line breaks. Add ^ directly after a letter to flag that figure as a word ending.

0 / 1,200 code points
Visual figure keypad

Choose a figure to append its letter token. The flag option is used once, then turns off.

Entered figure sequence

Use the keypad or enter a transcription.

Ready to decode.

A flagged figure adds one ASCII space unless it is the last figure. Unflagged figures remain in the same word.

03 / Reference

Full labelled alphabet

Doyle's manuscript supplies 18 poses. The eight cards marked "Later completion" are F, J, K, Q, U, W, X, and Z from the conventional Aage Rieck Sørensen completion.

    04 / Guide

    Behavior and limits

    • Historical rule: each pose substitutes for one letter. A flag changes that pose into a word-ending variant; it is not another letter or a separate cipher symbol.
    • Text handling: lowercase ASCII is folded to uppercase. Runs of ASCII space, tab, CR, or LF collapse to one word boundary. Leading and trailing separators do not create empty words, and every final word receives a terminal flag.
    • Unsupported text: punctuation, digits, accented letters, non-Latin scripts, emoji, combining marks, and other characters are rejected as a whole. Nothing is silently stripped or Unicode-normalized.
    • Limits: encoding accepts at most 500 Unicode code points and 300 letter figures. Transcription accepts at most 1,200 code points and 300 tokens. A failed check leaves the entered text in place and never renders a partial sequence.
    • Scope: this is the Dancing Men monoalphabetic substitution, not Pigpen. It is useful for literature, puzzles, and education, but it is not secure encryption and should not protect sensitive information.
    • Privacy: conversion runs in this page. The tool makes no requests, saves no input, and uses the clipboard only after a Copy button is pressed.

    Story and alphabet note

    In The Adventure of the Dancing Men, Holmes reads the first message as AM HERE ABE SLANEY and infers that flags divide words. The surviving manuscript does not define all 26 letters. The manuscript alphabet reference identifies the 18 attested letters, while the completed key used here follows the documented Sørensen reconstruction. Small drawing differences occur across manuscript, magazine, font, and modern puzzle versions.