Pig Pen Code

[Don Alaska]

Has anyone ever used Pig Pen Code? I read recently that it was once in common use among UK teenagers as a way to communicate secretly. Is this true and has anyone here form the UK used it? It seems to be a simple but quite secure way to communicate if variations are used.

 

[Yvonne Smith]

What is pig pen code , @Don Alaska ? When I was in school (Jr. High) there was the tic-tac-toe code, which was simple to use and looked weird to anyone who didn’t know what it was. I used that a lot for “secret communications” that teenagers love to have.

 

[Don Alaska]

What is pig pen code , @Don Alaska ? When I was in school (Jr. High) there was the tic-tac-toe code, which was simple to use and looked weird to anyone who didn’t know what it was. I used that a lot for “secret communications” that teenagers love to have.

From what I gather, it is similar. It uses a tic-tac-toe grid and and x. Perhasp you are familiar with it. I had never heard of it until I read about it.

 

[Jacob Petersheim]

I was into this for a time as a kid, when I wolfed down recreational mathematics material by Martin Gardner. He had a column in Scientific American for a long time, back when that magazine had not been taken over yet by a political slant. That led me to the non-fiction work of Isaac Asimov and other writers in the field. Cryptography was a part of this, including historical systems.

 

[Yvonne Smith]

From what I gather, it is similar. It uses a tic-tac-toe grid and and x. Perhasp you are familiar with it. I had never heard of it until I read about it.

Yes, it is the same code, just a different name for it. One set plain, and one set with dots in the center of each division of the grid and the X. Works perfectly, and you can decode it without having to carry any kind of information to remember it. It looks nothing like any kind of letters when written out, so it is hard for someone not familiar with it to figure it out.

 

[Smithy]

Never heard of it, maybe it's US thing?

 

[Joe Riley]

 

[Don Alaska]

Never heard of it, maybe it's US thing?

Interesting. I read it was a British thing. I hadn't heard of it either before I read the reference. Maybe it is a regional thing since @Yvonne Smith seems to know about it.

 

[Joe Riley]

Maybe it was Pig Latin?

 

[Don Alaska]

Maybe it was Pig Latin?

I thought perhaps Pig Latin was the American equivalent, but I guess not.

 

[Yvonne Smith]

I thought perhaps Pig Latin was the American equivalent, but I guess not.

I can’t understand why they would call it a pigpen code in the first place ? It is made with the tic-tac-toe and the X grids, and does not in any way resemble a pigpen, and as far as I can see, has no relation to the word “pig”either.
I asked CoPilot, and he said it was also called FreeMason’s code, and has been used for centuries. He didn’t know why it was called pigpen code, either; so I guess it is still a mystery.
Here is what it looks like written out, and how my name looks when spelled out in the code.

 

[Joe Riley]

"The Pigpen code, also known as the Pigpen cipher, is a simple substitution cipher that uses geometric symbols to represent letters of the alphabet. It is often associated with the Freemasons and is easy to decode using a grid system."

Pigpen cipher - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Don Alaska]

Not so easy if a rotation of the grid is used. The change would have to be passed to the receiver, but it would be very time consuming to decode.

I guess the pig pen nomenclature would be the same as Pig Latin, just a name. No dots could be inserted as well, which would mean the letter would be determined somewhat by context. A change in language could also be used to make it even tougher, such as using a common language, such as Spanish, or a tougher one such as Japanese or Russian, which wouldn't use all the letters in a Western alphabet.

 

[Joe Riley]

In a way a foreign language is a form of code in itself.