The Dancing Men
A little cipher of stick figures, in the spirit of the one Sherlock Holmes worked out for Mr. Hilton Cubitt — each letter its own small dancer, and a flag raised on the last man of every word.
Set a cipher key
This word decides which figure stands for which letter — the same shuffling trick real cipher clerks used, so the mapping below isn't just A=1, B=2. Two people need the same key to read each other's messages.
Write a message
Letters, digits, commas, full stops, colons, and spaces — anything else is quietly dropped. Numbers carry a small square banner, and each punctuation mark gets its own marker, so you can always tell them apart from a plain letter at a glance. Your cipher is drawn below, along with a plain code you can copy and send to anyone else running this page with the same key.
Read a message
Paste a cipher code (the number string from above) to have it drawn out and translated back.
The alphabet
Two planted legs on every man — only the arms change from letter to letter. This chart updates with your key above, since which figure means which letter is the whole secret. Digits and punctuation sit at the end, each flying its own kind of flag: a square banner for numbers, a comma-shaped pennant, a single dot for a full stop, and two dots for a colon.