cipher ring

2011-04-16

I was thinking about buying a pigpen cipher ring from 14th place. I stumbled upon it while looking for a ring that could be used for a vigenère cipher.

cipher ring

Ring from 14th place

It’s a bit hard to see, but the lower section has the letters N to V, the rest of the alphabet carries on around the back. The top section has the symbols used in a pigpen cipher.

I’ve been slightly put off buying one as I can’t really understand what cipher version they have used for the ring. The mason “standard” pigpen cipher listed on wikipedia doesn’t seem to match the images on 14th place’s web site at all:

ring key

ring key from wikipedia

The example from 14th place’s website is the phrase “NO POST”, which they state becomes this:

NO POST

This spells "NO POST", or does it?

However, if you follow the wikipedia version, it’s “PM JMKR”.

Below is what I can work out for certain from the image of the ring:

filled in sections

Filled in from the visible sections of the ring

In my mind, the blanks might be filled in something like the below, given the bottom to top, left to right way the square on the right was filled in:

best guess

My best guess as to the rest

I don’t know why they would choose fill out the letters like this though, it really doesn’t make much sense, given the left to right, top to bottom conventions of most of the western world. The version on wikipedia makes much more sense (to me at least).

I’d be interested to find out where the 14th place version came from.