
It rose to prominence in the 1980’s when it was used in the net.jokes newsgroup in the early days of the internet. In his private correspondence, Julius Caesar would use a 3-letter shift to make his messages more difficult for prying eyes to read. That’s because the first recorded case of the shift cipher being used was by Julius Caesar. Shift ciphers are also known as Caesar Ciphers. The most commonly used letter in English is the letter E, so if your most frequently used character is R, you’re probably looking at ROT13. Find the most commonly used character in the cipher text.
#Code translator code
If you come across some code and you’re not sure if you are looking at ROT13 or another, similar cipher you can use frequency analysis to identify the shift.

ROT 13 translatioįor example, HELLO, would be translated to URYYB: ROT 13 example You can then substitute the letters accordingly, so if the cipher text has a letter A, the plain text is N and vice versa. If you think might be looking at a piece of ROT13 code, all you need to do is to write the letters A-M on a piece of paper, and the letters N to Z below them. ROT13 is easy to translate without any tools. However, it doesn’t encode numbers or punctuation, which gives it some limitations.

Because the alphabet is 26 letters, and the shift is 13 letters, A translates to N and vice versa. What makes ROT13 unique is that it is its own inverse. It’s also a type of substitution cipher, because one letter is substituted for another. The name is a shorthand version of ‘rotation 13’. But it's still fun to play with.ROT13 is a shift cipher, that’s a simple kind of encryption where the ciphertext is created by taking the plain text message and shifting (moving forward in the alphabet) by a certain number of letters. Why? Because, in order to decode it, you need to know how many letters the message was shifted in the first place! Of course, if you don't know, it's not impossible.you just have to "unshift" it one letter at a time, until you get a message that makes sense!ĭo you think people use this code for things they need to keep secret? No, they don't. Is this code difficult to decode? Well, it's only a little bit harder to decode than the Backwards Alphabet Code. This encoder Shifts all the letters one, so an A becomes a B, a B becomes a C, and so on. Get the idea? Now you can try the Encoder at the top of the page. Uh oh again! what happens when I get to the letter Y? I can't count forward 3 letters, because there aren't enough letters in the alphabet! That's okay.just start over at the beginning, after you count the Z. Uh oh.what about punctuation (like that question mark at the end of "Hi, HOW ARE YOU?"? Just leave that exactly the way it is. Keep going through the whole message like that.

Then, since the next letter is I, find the I and count forward to get the letter L.

So, if my message was "HI, HOW ARE YOU?" I would begin by finding the letter H, then counting foward three letters, to get the letter K. Now, when you write down your coded message, instead of writing the realletter, you find that letter in the alphabet and count forward - as many letters as the number you picked. Begin by writing down the alphabet in order on a piece of paper (or use the one below).Ī B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z The Shifted Alphabet Code is very very easy to do.
