The Pigpen Cipher is one of the oldest ciphers known to man. It was a simple but effective way of relaying information across parties. However, the advancement in knowledge and technology, alongside the attribution from shapes to letters makes the cipher very easy to break as it is just a simple substitution. You can think of the Pigpen Cipher as just an alphabet that is instead made of shapes/symbols.

You can find a visual here.

As you can see from the entire Pigpen alphabet, each of the letters is represented by one sector of their cross/grid. Let’s try an example, and encode the word steganography in Pigpen.

Each of these characters spell out: S T E G A N O G R A P H Y.

In order to decode messages, make sure to pay close attention to the orientation of the lines, checking if they’re angled or linear, and seeing if there is a dot modifier. This will allow you to single down the cross that you need to translate each letter.

Since there’s no way to input geometric shapes into a program, decoding must be done by hand. However, you can use an archived version of Cryptii to encode messages to Pigpen.