Hieroglyphics Translator

Ancient Egyptian had an alphabet, and it was small. The Unicode Standard puts it plainly: "Egyptian hieroglyphic writing made use of 24 hieroglyphs for individual consonants" (Unicode Standard 16.0, chapter 11).

Twenty-four signs, one consonant each. And that is the entire alphabet, because Egyptian did not write vowels down at all.

Key Takeaways

• The hieroglyphic "alphabet" is 24 signs for individual consonants. There are no vowel letters.
• Between 700 and 1,000 hieroglyphs were in regular use across the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms, and the Greco-Roman period pushed the count of variants to about 10,000.
• Other signs stand for two or three consonants at once, so one picture can be a whole syllable.
• A royal name went inside a cartouche, the oval loop with a bar at one end.
• You can tell which way to read a line by which way the people and animals are facing: you read into their faces.

What are the 24 letters of the hieroglyphic alphabet?

They are the signs that carry the value of a single consonant, and Egyptologists list them in a fixed order that has nothing to do with A to Z.

University College London's Digital Egypt catalogue sets them out as "signs with the phonetic value of one consonant" and gives twenty-four of them (UCL Digital Egypt). Written in the Manuel de Codage, the plain ASCII scheme Egyptologists use online in place of the diacritic-heavy transliteration used in print, they are:

A · i · a · w · b · p · f · m · n · r · h · H · x · X · z · s · S · q · k · g · t · T · d · D

Read that list again and notice what is missing. There is no e, no o, no u. The i and the a in it are not the vowels you are thinking of: they stand for consonants English does not really have, which Egyptologists write with those letters as a convention. And because that scheme is case-sensitive, the pairs h and H, or t and T, are two entirely different consonants rather than two ways of writing one.

So a chart that maps English letters onto Egyptian signs, vowels included, is doing something the ancient script never did. That is a useful piece of theatre, in a museum gift shop or anywhere else. It is not how the script worked.

Why are there no vowels in hieroglyphics?

Because Egyptian belongs to a class of writing systems that simply does not record them.

The Unicode Consortium's own glossary gives the name for that class. An abjad is "a writing system in which only consonants are indicated", a term "derived from the first four letters of the traditional order of the Arabic script: alef, beh, jeem, dal" (Unicode Glossary). Vowels are left for the reader to supply, the way a fluent English reader supplies the missing letters in txt msg.

The consequence is not small. Because the vowels went unwritten, we largely do not know how ancient Egyptian was pronounced. Every "Egyptian" pronunciation you have heard is a modern reconstruction or a convention. The script preserved the skeleton of the language and let the flesh go.

Phoenician works the same way, and its descendants kept the habit: Hebrew and Arabic still write consonants first and mark vowels only when they must.

Then how did anyone tell two words apart?

With a second class of sign that carried no sound at all.

UCL's description of the system splits hieroglyphs into "signs denoting sounds and signs denoting ideas" (UCL Digital Egypt). Drop the vowels out of a language and you get a lot of words that look identical on the page. So scribes tacked on a silent picture at the end showing "the object or the area to which the word belongs".

Egyptologists call these determinatives, or classifiers. The Unicode Standard describes the same job as enabling "the reader to distinguish between words which were otherwise written the same".

UCL's worked example is the god Anubis. A run of sound signs gives the consonants, beginning i, n and p. Then comes a jackal lying on a shrine, which is not pronounced and never was. It is there to tell you that the consonants you just read are a god, and which one.

That silent picture is the part no name chart can reproduce, and it is the part that made the writing readable.

Why do some hieroglyphs stand for two or three consonants at once?

Because the 24 single-consonant signs were never the main event.

Beyond them, "other hieroglyphs are used to represent a sequence of two or three consonants", the Unicode Standard notes. Egyptologists call the three classes uniliteral, biliteral and triliteral, for one, two and three consonants respectively. UCL's catalogue shows a selection of biliteral signs, with values like mr, nb, pr and kA. Its triliteral set includes anx, nTr and Htp, the last of which you have met if you have ever seen the name Amenhotep.

Sign class	Consonants per sign	Examples
Uniliteral	One	The 24 listed above
Biliteral	Two	mr, nb, pr, kA
Triliteral	Three	anx, nTr, Htp

One of these has a name and a picture in the Gardiner Sign List, the standard catalogue of hieroglyphs. Sign E34, the Unicode Standard records, is a "desert hare" and carries the sound wn. Not a w and then an n as two letters, but the pair together, in one drawing of a hare.

Scribes then often wrote a single-consonant sign next to a multi-consonant one as a hint, a practice UCL describes as adding "reminders" of the content of the bigger sign. The reminder was not a second reading of the sound. It was a nudge that you had the right sign.

Put those layers together and a short Egyptian word can hold a two-consonant sign, a phonetic reminder repeating part of it, and a determinative that is silent. Three pictures, one word, one sound.

So how would a scribe have written your name?

Consonants only, then a sign saying what sort of thing it is.

The operation is not "delete the vowel letters". It is: say the name out loud, and write only the consonants you actually hear.

Take TOM. Said aloud that is t and m, both of which sit in the list of 24 above. That two-consonant skeleton is the whole of the phonetic spelling, and the o never appears anywhere. A reader who already knew the name would supply it. A reader who did not would be guessing, which is exactly the position Egyptian readers were in with foreign names.

Then the scribe would add a determinative, because t-m on its own could be anything. Following the principle UCL sets out, the silent sign would say this is a person, the way the jackal on a shrine says this is a god.

Now do it by sound rather than by spelling, and watch letters disappear that a chart would have kept. SARAH is s-r: the final h is not pronounced, so it is not written. THOMAS is t-m-s, because the h in Thomas is silent too. Strip the letters instead of the sounds and you get s-r-h and t-h-m-s, which are spellings of the English, not of the name.

Your own accent will move the line, too. A speaker who does not pronounce the r in a name like MARK would not write one, and a speaker who does would.

There is a further limit worth knowing before you type. The 24 signs cover the consonants of Egyptian, which is not the same inventory as the consonants of English: the l in Laura has no clean single-sign equivalent, for one. Scribes writing foreign names did what anyone does in that position. They approximated, and accepted that the result was a near miss.

What is a cartouche, and why are names inside one?

A cartouche is the oval loop with a straight bar across one end, drawn around a name. It is the single most recognisable thing in Egyptian writing, and it is a piece of punctuation.

The Unicode Standard is specific about who got one: "the two principal names of the king, the nomen and prenomen, were normally written inside a cartouche". Not everyone's name. The king's.

That restriction is exactly why the cartouche mattered so much to decipherment. A ring drawn around a group of signs is a visible label saying this is a royal name, and a royal name is a word whose sounds can be guessed from the Greek version of the same text.

Champollion worked from cartouches, and the Rosetta Stone gave him the Greek. He announced the breakthrough in his Lettre à M. Dacier of 1822, and the Unicode Standard dates his published decipherment of Egyptian to 1824, so both years get quoted and both are defensible depending on which event you mean.

Which way do you read a line of hieroglyphs?

Into the faces.

Hieroglyphs run left to right, right to left, in horizontal rows or in vertical columns, and the script gives you the answer visually. As the Unicode Standard puts it, "directionality of a text is usually easy to determine because one reads a line facing into the glyphs depicting the faces of people or animals."

If the owls and the seated men are looking left, you start at the left. It is a rule you can apply to a wall in a museum with no training at all.

Signs were also not simply strung out in a line. The Unicode Standard records that they were packed into a notional rectangle called a quadrat, arranged inside it "in an aesthetically-pleasing manner". A tall sign and two short ones stack. Two wide ones sit one above the other. The writing was designed to look good, and that consideration outranked strict linear order. Ogham, carved up the edge of a standing stone, is the opposite extreme: a script with no layout choices at all.

How long were hieroglyphs in use?

Longer than almost anything else humans have written with.

Hieroglyphic writing "appeared in Egypt at the end of the fourth millennium BCE", the Unicode Standard records, and hieroglyphs "were used to write Egyptian for more than 3,000 years". Rarer signs sat alongside the 700 to 1,000 in regular use, and during the Greco-Roman period the count of variants distinguished by modern scholars grew to about 10,000.

The script has a closing date, too, and a precise one. An inscription dated 24 August 394 CE, on the Gateway of Hadrian in the temple complex at Philae, is thought to be among the very last examples of Egyptian written in hieroglyphs.

After that the knowledge was gone for roughly fourteen centuries, and every hieroglyph anyone looked at in between was a picture nobody could read. No cipher in the whole codes collection has ever kept anything hidden that long, and this was not even a cipher. It was an accident.

Frequently asked questions

How many letters are in the hieroglyphic alphabet?

Twenty-four, if by letters you mean signs standing for one consonant each. The Unicode Standard states that "Egyptian hieroglyphic writing made use of 24 hieroglyphs for individual consonants". The full script was far larger, with between 700 and 1,000 signs in regular use.

Can you really write your name in hieroglyphics?

You can write the consonants you hear in it. Egyptian wrote no vowels, so TOM is t-m and SARAH is s-r, the final h being silent. A chart that gives you a sign for every English letter is a modern convenience rather than a historical spelling, and a scribe would also have added a silent determinative to say what kind of thing the name was.

Why do hieroglyphs have no vowels?

The script recorded consonants and left vowels to the reader. The Unicode Glossary calls a system like that an abjad, "a writing system in which only consonants are indicated". One practical consequence is that the pronunciation of ancient Egyptian is largely lost.

What does a cartouche mean?

It marks a royal name. The Unicode Standard notes that the king's two principal names, the nomen and prenomen, were normally written inside one. The oval loop is the reason Champollion could pick royal names out of a text before he could read the rest of it.

When did people stop writing in hieroglyphs?

The latest known hieroglyphic inscription is dated 24 August 394 CE, on the Gateway of Hadrian at Philae. Demotic and then Coptic had already replaced hieroglyphs and hieratic for most practical writing well before that.

Try your own name in the box above. Then say it out loud, type only the consonants you actually hear, and run it again. That second version is the closer one, and it is not the same thing as deleting the vowel letters. When you are done, Cuneiform solves the same problem with clay, and the full Ancient Scripts console has the rest.

Sources

• The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode Standard, Version 16.0, Chapter 11: Cuneiform and Hieroglyphs - retrieved 3 August 2026, https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode16.0.0/core-spec/chapter-11/
• The Unicode Consortium, Unicode Glossary - retrieved 3 August 2026, https://www.unicode.org/glossary/
• University College London, Digital Egypt for Universities: phonetic signs - retrieved 3 August 2026, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/writing/phoneticsigns.html
• University College London, Digital Egypt for Universities: the system of hieroglyphic writing - retrieved 3 August 2026, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/writing/system1.html