One text, every script.

📡 Morse code

Morse represents each letter as a short pattern of dots (short pulses) and dashes (long pulses, three times the length of a dot). Gaps separate the letters, and a longer gap — shown here as a slash / — separates words. The most common letters get the shortest codes: E is a single dot and T a single dash, which keeps real messages fast to send.

Developed by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail in the late 1830s and 1840s, it turned the electric telegraph into the first global communication network. Operators could move news across continents in minutes instead of weeks. The distress signal SOS (· · · — — — · · ·) was standardised in 1906 because it is short, symmetrical and unmistakable. Morse is still alive today in amateur (ham) radio and in aviation, where navigation beacons broadcast their identifiers in code.

💾 Binary

Binary is base-2: every value is written with just two digits, 0 and 1, called bits. Computers use it because a circuit can reliably tell "off" from "on." To store text, each character is mapped to a number through a character set such as ASCII or Unicode; Polyglyph then shows that number as an 8-bit group. The letter A, for example, is 65, which is 01000001.

The base-2 system was described by Gottfried Leibniz in 1689, and George Boole's logic of true and false later gave it a mathematical home. When that logic met electronics in the twentieth century, binary became the native language of every computer, phone and memory chip on Earth.

🧮 Hexadecimal

Hexadecimal is base-16. It uses the digits 0–9 and then the letters A–F to stand for the values ten to fifteen. Its appeal is tidiness: one hex digit maps to exactly four bits, so two hex digits describe one byte. That makes long binary strings far easier for people to read and type.

You meet hexadecimal whenever you pick a web colour (#6366F1), inspect a file byte-by-byte, read a memory address, or look at a checksum or hash. It is the everyday shorthand programmers use to talk about raw data.

🧩 Base64

Base64 takes any binary data and rewrites it using just 64 safe, printable characters: A–Z, a–z, 0–9, plus + and /, with = for padding. It does this by slicing the data into six-bit chunks, since 2⁶ equals 64. The result is about a third larger than the original but can travel safely through systems that only expect text.

That is why Base64 quietly powers so much of the web: it embeds images directly in HTML and CSS (data URLs), carries email attachments under the MIME standard, and packages tokens and small files for transport. It is an encoding, not encryption — anyone can decode it.

🎙️ NATO phonetic alphabet

When a radio crackles or accents differ, single letters are easy to mishear — "B," "D" and "P" all sound alike. The solution is to replace each letter with a whole word: Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, and so on. The words were chosen and tested so they stay distinct even through noise, which is why some are spelled unusually — "Alfa" and "Juliett" avoid spellings that confuse non-English speakers.

Officially the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, it was refined in the early 1950s and adopted by the International Civil Aviation Organization in 1956. Pilots, sailors, soldiers, police and call-centre staff still use it every day to spell names and codes without error.

⠿ Braille

Braille is read by touch. Each character is a cell of up to six raised dots arranged in two columns of three, giving 64 possible patterns. Polyglyph uses uncontracted (grade-1) Braille, spelling words out letter by letter, and places a number sign before digits. It also supports Korean (Hangul) Braille: each syllable is broken into its initial, medial and final sounds, following the Korean Braille standard.

The system was invented by Louis Braille in 1824. Blinded in an accident as a child, he adapted a military "night writing" code into something a finger could read quickly. Today it appears on signs, lift buttons, medicine packaging and books in nearly every country, giving blind and low-vision readers independent access to the written word.

🪨 Runic (Elder Futhark)

The Elder Futhark is the oldest known runic alphabet, named — like the word "alphabet" itself — after its first few letters: f, u, þ, a, r, k. Its 24 angular runes were designed to be cut into wood, stone and metal, which is why they favour straight lines over curves. Polyglyph transliterates modern Latin letters to their closest rune, so the result is an approximation rather than an authentic historical spelling.

Germanic peoples used these runes from roughly the second to the eighth century CE for inscriptions, memorials and marks of ownership. Today you are most likely to meet them in art, jewellery, games and stories — symbols that still carry a sense of the ancient.

🙃 Upside-down text

This is a modern, playful trick rather than a historical code. For each character it finds a Unicode look-alike that resembles the original rotated 180 degrees — an e becomes ǝ, an a becomes ɐ — and then reverses the whole string so it reads correctly when flipped. The text genuinely looks upside down, with no image required, which is why it is popular for usernames, bios and social-media posts.

🔄 ROT13

ROT13 is a Caesar cipher that shifts every letter 13 places along the alphabet. Because the alphabet has 26 letters and 13 is exactly half, applying ROT13 twice returns the original text — so the same operation both scrambles and unscrambles. It offers no real security; its job is simply to hide text in plain sight, such as spoilers, punchlines or puzzle answers, until a reader chooses to reveal them.

🔐 Atbash

Atbash is a mirror substitution cipher: the first letter swaps with the last, the second with the second-to-last, and so on (A↔Z, B↔Y). Like ROT13, it is its own inverse. It is one of the oldest ciphers known, originally applied to the Hebrew alphabet, and examples appear in the Hebrew Bible. It is a piece of cryptographic history more than a secure tool.

👾 Leetspeak

"Leet" — from "elite" — swaps letters for numbers and symbols that resemble them: E→3, A→4, O→0, S→5. It grew out of bulletin-board and hacker communities in the 1980s as a playful in-group style. Because several letters can map to the same symbol, leet is ambiguous, so converting it back to plain text is only ever a best guess.

🅵 Fullwidth (vaporwave) text

Fullwidth characters are wide Unicode versions of ordinary Latin letters and digits, created so Roman script could sit neatly beside the square characters of Chinese, Japanese and Korean typesetting. Spread out across the page, they give text a calm, retro feel that became a signature of the "vaporwave" aesthetic — which is why Ｈｅｌｌｏ looks so different from "Hello."