Cryptogram Maker

v1.1, 2019-08-23

Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's short story, The Gold Bug, this tool lets you create simple substitution ciphers or "cryptograms". Type or paste your message in the first box, generate a NEW KEY, then click ENCODE. Your encoded message will appear in the bottom box.

Spaces and punctuation are removed, just like in Poe's story. To see an example, you can click the links for Poe's text and Poe's key. This will generate the same cryptogram used in the story.

Share encoded messages with your friends and see if they can decode them without the key. If you need help, read the The Gold Bug. A character named Mr. Legrand teaches you how to solve cryptograms and ciphers by looking at the patterns of characters.

Enter / Paste Your Plaintext Message Here:

Notes

Messages must use the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet (a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z). Spaces, numbers, accented letters, punctuation, and other symbols, are removed before encoding.
The cryptogram in Poe's story doesn't use any letters. In order to create the same type of encoded messages, the generated keys do not contain any letters either. You CAN create your own keys with any combination of upper and lower case letters and symbols.
The key must contain exactly 26 characters, but they don't all have to be unique. You can use the same character multiple times in the key to make it even harder. You can create many different kinds of keys.
More example keys: (click the link to use the key)
change all vowels to "-"
reversed alphabet
convert to ALL CAPS
convert to camel case (just for fun)
b451c l337 (if you're a h4x0r LOL)