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Cipher Cove

Standard Galactic Alphabet Translator

Turn English into the Standard Galactic Alphabet from the Minecraft enchanting table, or paste Galactic text to read it in English.

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Not an official Minecraft product. Not approved by or associated with Mojang or Microsoft.

How to use the translator

  1. Type or paste English in the English box. The Galactic text appears as you type, with the real letter shapes underneath.
  2. Press Copy to paste the text into a chat, a document or a social post, or Save as PNG for an image of the real letter shapes.
  3. To read Galactic text, press the arrows between the two labels and paste it. If you paste it into the English box, the translator offers to switch for you.

The alphabet has no capital letters, so HELLO and hello give the same result, and English comes back in lowercase.

Standard Galactic Alphabet chart

Each letter of the alphabet with its real shape, as in Minecraft and Commander Keen, and the look-alike characters used for copy and paste. Tap a letter to copy its look-alike.

A few letters are easy to mix up: I is a broken vertical line and J three dots in a column, while Y is two full lines. P is an exclamation mark followed by an upside-down one.

Copy and paste text vs. the real letters

The Standard Galactic Alphabet is not part of Unicode, so there is no way to copy the exact Minecraft letters as text. Fans settled on look-alike characters from other scripts and symbol sets: Canadian Aboriginal syllabics for A and E, a Vai letter for K, a Japanese katakana letter for N, math symbols for G, R, W and Z. That is the set this translator copies, because it is what other Galactic translators read. Some look-alikes are close and some are rough, which is why the translator also shows the real shapes.

The real shapes on this page come from the Under-ConScript Unicode Registry, a community list that places the alphabet at private-use code points. Only fonts that follow it can show those characters, so they work for the preview and the PNG but not for pasting into other apps.

Where the alphabet comes from

Game designer Tom Hall created the Standard Galactic Alphabet for Commander Keen in 1990 as a way to hide messages for players on signs in the game. Minecraft adopted it in 2011 for the enchanting table, during the Java Edition Beta 1.9 prereleases. Notch's first screenshot of the enchanting screen hid jokes such as "these names will be random and confusing" in the alphabet, and a limited edition Minecraft Xbox One S from 2017 carries the message "never dig straight down". The alphabet also appears on the Earth Crystal in A Minecraft Movie (2025).

Our other translators turn text into Wingdings symbols and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Frequently asked questions

What does the enchanting table text say?

Nothing useful. The words on the enchanting table are written in the Standard Galactic Alphabet, so you can read them letter by letter, but they are random and do not tell you which enchantment you will get. Hover over an option to see one of its enchantments instead.

Is the Standard Galactic Alphabet a real language?

No. It is a substitution alphabet for English: each of the 26 letters has its own symbol, and the words stay English. That is why translating it is a letter-for-letter swap in both directions.

Why does the copied text look different from Minecraft?

Unicode has no Standard Galactic letters, so copy and paste uses a widely shared set of look-alike characters from other scripts. They are only approximations, and a few letters take two characters, such as !¡ for P and || for Y. The panel under the translation and the PNG show the real letter shapes.

Can I paste Galactic text from another translator?

Yes, if it uses the common look-alike characters. The translator also reads T without its dot and letters typed with a font that puts the alphabet at Unicode private-use code points U+EB40 to U+EB59.

What happens to numbers and punctuation?

They stay as they are, because the alphabet only has letters (the Commander Keen version also has quotation marks and a full stop). Accented letters lose their accents, so é becomes the symbol for E.

Is this an official Minecraft tool?

No. Cipher Cove is an independent fan site. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Mojang Studios or Microsoft, and it does not use the Minecraft font. The letter shapes come from GNU Unifont, an open-source font.

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