ENCODE
ANYTHING.

Dots and dashes. Letters split by spaces, words by /.

Developed in the 1830s and 40s by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail for the electric telegraph, Morse code turns language into timed on/off pulses a single wire can carry. It was the backbone of long-distance and maritime signalling for over a century, and its distress call - SOS, ...---... - is still recognised the world over.

8-bit ASCII. Each character becomes eight ones and zeros.

Binary writes every character as a run of 0s and 1s, the only two states a digital circuit needs. The scheme used here is ASCII, standardised in 1963, which gives each letter, digit and symbol its own 8-bit code - the layer sitting underneath essentially all the text a computer stores.

Alfa Bravo Charlie - the radio spelling alphabet.

The NATO phonetic alphabet - Alfa, Bravo, Charlie - was finalised in 1956 to spell letters out unambiguously over noisy radio. Each code word was picked to stay intelligible across many languages, which is why aviation, the military and emergency services still use it today.

Grade-1 braille. Each letter becomes a raised-dot cell.

Louis Braille, blind since childhood, devised his raised-dot system in 1824 at the age of 15, adapting a military "night writing" code. Each character is a cell of up to six dots read by touch, and it remains the primary tactile writing system for blind readers worldwide.

Numbers the Roman way. 2024 becomes MMXXIV.

Roman numerals build numbers from letters - I, V, X, L, C, D, M - by adding and subtracting, a system Rome inherited from the Etruscans and used across its empire. Clumsy for arithmetic, they survive on clock faces, book chapters, monuments and film copyright dates.

Rome’s cipher. Every letter slides three along the alphabet.

Named for Julius Caesar, who used it around the 1st century BC to protect military messages, the Caesar cipher shifts every letter a fixed number of places along the alphabet. It is one of the oldest and simplest substitution ciphers - and, with only 25 possible shifts, one of the easiest to break.

Mirror the alphabet - A becomes Z, B becomes Y.

Atbash is an ancient Hebrew cipher that mirrors the alphabet, swapping the first letter for the last, the second for the second-last, and so on. It appears in the Hebrew Bible, in the Book of Jeremiah, and is self-reversing: encoding and decoding are the exact same operation.

Move the leading sound to the end and add a knock-off Latin ending.

Pig Latin is a playful English word game rather than a real language, recorded since at least the 19th century. The rule is simple - move the opening consonant sound to the end and add "-ay" - turning "hello" into "ellohay" and letting children (and the odd trainee spy) talk in near-code.

Letters as numbers - A is 1, Z is 26.

The A1Z26 cipher swaps each letter for its position in the alphabet: A is 1, B is 2, on up to Z at 26. It needs no key and hides plain words inside strings of numbers, which makes it a staple of puzzle hunts and escape rooms.

RFC 4648 text-safe binary encoding - the format behind data URIs and email attachments.

Base64, standardised in RFC 4648, encodes binary data using 64 printable characters so it can travel safely through text-only channels. It keeps nothing secret - anyone can decode it - but it is everywhere, quietly carrying email attachments, data URIs and web tokens.