Use this online Dancing Men cipher encoder to turn English or Russian text into stick figure symbols inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story. Preview the figures instantly and download the result as an image.
SHERLOCK HOLMES
Each letter becomes a unique stick figure pose. Spaces separate words.
HELLO WORLD
Repeated letters use repeated poses, making letter patterns visible in the encoded message.
SECRET MESSAGE
A practical English example for a treasure hunt, escape room, or classroom cipher activity.
MEET ME AT BAKER STREET
A Sherlock Holmes-themed English message with repeated letters and several word breaks.
The Dancing Men cipher is a visual substitution code made famous by Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes short story "The Adventure of the Dancing Men," first published in 1903. A different stick figure represents each letter, making a message look like a line of people frozen in dance poses.
This online Dancing Men cipher encoder uses a systematic alphabet inspired by Doyle's idea. Each figure is built from three variables: the left arm can point down, sideways, or up; the right arm has the same three positions; and the legs can be together, left apart, right apart, or both apart. The 3 × 3 × 4 combinations provide 36 distinct poses—enough for all 26 English letters or all 33 Russian letters.
To encode a message, select the English or Russian alphabet and enter your text. The figures appear instantly as you type. Letter case does not change the result, spaces remain visible as word breaks, and an unsupported character is shown as a question mark. You can then download the complete visual message as a PNG image. Processing happens locally in your browser.
No key is required: the same letter always produces the same pose within the selected alphabet. That makes the code easy to use for puzzles, classroom activities, escape rooms, treasure hunts, and Sherlock Holmes-themed messages, but unsuitable for protecting confidential information.
This is an adapted alphabet rather than an exact digital copy of the drawings in the story. Doyle's original messages use a fixed set of hand-drawn figures, and flagged figures indicate word endings. This tool uses a regular pose system and ordinary spaces so it can support two complete alphabets consistently.
This chart is the complete English substitution alphabet used by this encoder. Every letter from A to Z has exactly one unique pose, and each pose shown here matches the figures generated by the tool. You can therefore use the chart to verify an encoded message or read it back manually. The mapping is valid and internally consistent for this implementation, but it is a systematic adaptation rather than an exact reproduction of Arthur Conan Doyle's original hand-drawn alphabet.
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