Pigpen Cyphers

Pigpen Cyphers

In these tutorials we like to cover codes and cyphers and hopefully give you a bit more understanding into them. Today's subject is the Pigpen Cypher.

Pigpen is said to have been associated with the Freemasons and is popular as it's simple to work with.

Break the Cyphers

With a Pigpen Cypher use a geometric shape to represent a letter. Without knowledge of this cypher your message can look like an alien language.

We are going to show you how to use this cypher yourself and some variations you could use.

Understanding Pigpen Cypher

The first system we're going to show you uses a simple 9 space grid, which resembles a noughts and crosses board (a tic-tac-toe board to anyone outside the UK).

In the boxes we place our letters, we then use a marker to indicate which letter in that box we are referring to. The marker position corresponds to the letter location - left, middle or right.

Try using what you've learnt to crack our cypher. (Answer is in the video see here.)

 

How To Use The Pigpen Cypher

 

Working on from the above example, we are going to add a second geometric shape. This shape resembles a cross, but we use it the same way. We now put some of letters on the noughts and crosses board and some on the cross.

Again we use a mark to indicate which letter in that area we are referring to. This time we use a single mark, as there are only two possible letters per space. In our example having the mark there means use the second letter, but you could reverse it's meaning to mean use the first letter.

Try using what you've learnt to crack our cyphers. (Answers are in the video see here.)

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