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Cipher Cove

Hieroglyphics Translator

Type a name or a word to spell it in Egyptian hieroglyphs, one sign per sound, or paste hieroglyphs to read them as letters.

EnglishHieroglyphs
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How to use the translator

  1. Type a name, a word or a short message in the English box. The hieroglyphs appear as you type.
  2. Tick Cartouche to draw the oval around it, as on a royal name.
  3. Press Copy to paste the signs into a message or a document, or Save as PNG for an image that looks the same everywhere.
  4. To read hieroglyphs, press the arrows between the two labels and paste them. If you paste them into the English box, the translator offers to switch for you.

Numbers and punctuation have no sign in this chart, so they stay as they are.

The hieroglyphic alphabet

Ancient Egyptian had no alphabet as we know it, but 24 of its signs each stood for a single consonant. Egyptologists call them uniliteral signs, and they are the signs used to spell foreign names. The chart below gives the sign used for each English letter, what it depicts and its number in Gardiner's sign list, the standard catalog of hieroglyphs. Tap a sign to copy it.

The sounds come from the table of uniliteral signs on Wikipedia. English letters with no one-sound sign of their own borrow the closest sign:

  • A is the Egyptian vulture, a sound modern readers say as "ah".
  • E and I are the flowering reed, said "ee". Y is a pair of reeds.
  • O, U and W are the quail chick, said "w" or "oo".
  • L is the recumbent lion. Scribes of the Ptolemaic period used it for the L in Greek names such as Ptolemy and Cleopatra.
  • C, K and X: C and K are the basket with a handle (the hard K sound). X is the basket followed by the folded cloth, K plus S.
  • V is the horned viper, the F sound, the nearest one-sound sign.

Writing your name in a cartouche

A cartouche is the long oval drawn around the names of kings and queens. Tick Cartouche and the translator draws one around each line of your text, on screen and in the PNG. In copied text the oval becomes two Unicode characters, a start and an end, so it stays around the name when you paste it. Most fonts draw those as two separate brackets rather than a closed oval, so save a PNG when you want the full shape.

Names written by ancient scribes were not spelled letter by letter. Cleopatra in a real cartouche includes a sign for two sounds and ends with an egg, a sign added to the names of women in some periods. The translator gives a simple sound-by-sound spelling, which is easy to read but not what a scribe would have carved.

Reading hieroglyphs back

Paste hieroglyphs in the other direction to see the sounds as letters. Signs that stand for several English letters read as their Egyptian sound: the reed as i, the quail chick as w, the basket as k and the viper as f. Cartouche ends are skipped. Signs for words or whole syllables are not in the chart, so the translator leaves them in place and lists them below the box.

A little history

Hieroglyphs were in use for more than three thousand years, until the 4th century AD, and then nobody could read them for centuries. The breakthrough came from the Rosetta Stone, found by French troops in 1799, which carries the same text in hieroglyphs, in demotic and in Greek. Comparing royal names in cartouches with the Greek text helped Jean-François Champollion decipher the script, which he described in 1822. Hieroglyphs became part of Unicode in 2009, which is what lets you copy and paste them today.

For an alphabet from a video game rather than an ancient one, try the Standard Galactic Alphabet translator used on the Minecraft enchanting table.

Frequently asked questions

Does this translate English into the ancient Egyptian language?

No. It spells English with the hieroglyphs that stood for single sounds, the way people write a name in hieroglyphs today. Turning a sentence into real Egyptian would mean choosing Egyptian words and grammar, which a letter chart cannot do.

How do I write my name in hieroglyphs?

Type your name, then tick Cartouche to put it inside the oval that ancient Egyptians drew around royal names. Save it as a PNG to keep the oval, or copy the signs. Spelling it the way it sounds often works better than the way it is written, for example Philip as Filip.

Why do some letters share a sign?

Egyptian writing had signs for consonants and almost none for vowels, and none of its one-sound signs was made for L, O or V. E and I both use the flowering reed, O, U and W the quail chick, C and K the basket, and F and V the horned viper. When you read hieroglyphs back, those signs come out as one letter.

Can I translate hieroglyphs from a photo?

Not with this tool. It reads hieroglyphs that you paste as text, and only the signs that stand for one sound. To read signs from a photo or a carving, compare them with the alphabet chart on this page. Most real inscriptions also use signs for two or three sounds and signs for whole words, which this chart does not cover.

Why do the hieroglyphs show up as boxes?

The copied text is made of standard Unicode hieroglyphs, added to Unicode in 2009. The app you paste into needs a font that has them. Windows 10 and later include one; on other systems it depends on the fonts installed. Save a PNG when the exact look matters.

What do CH, KH and SH do?

Egyptian had single signs for these sounds: the tethering rope for ch, the sieve for kh and the garden pool for sh. When you type one of these letter pairs, the translator uses that one sign. CH in a name like Christopher sounds like K, so type it as K if you want the basket.

More translators and charts

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