The Dancing Men Cipher
Encode messages as dancing stick figures, the cipher from Sherlock Holmes' The Adventure of the Dancing Men. Elementary, once you have the key.
About Dancing Men
A childish row of stick figures dancing across a garden wall, and Sherlock Holmes reading it like a newspaper. The Adventure of the Dancing Men (1903) gave fiction its most charming cipher: each capering figure is a letter, and Holmes cracks it by frequency analysis, starting from the humble E.
Conan Doyle only defined the letters the story needed; enthusiasts completed the alphabet, and Krunes uses a systematically-drawn full set in that spirit. In the canon, a figure holding a flag marks the end of a word, watch for the flag-bearers in your message.
- Holmes breaks the cipher by guessing E first, the most common English letter.
- Flag-holding figures mark word endings in the original story.
- Conan Doyle defined only ~18 letters; fans completed the alphabet, as Krunes does.
- It is a pure substitution cipher, exactly the kind frequency analysis eats for breakfast.
The Dancing Men Key, A to Z
Hover or tap any letter to study it. This chart is the full key used by the translator above.
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