Translate English to Pig Latin and back. The classic schoolyard cipher, decoded.
Encode English text into Pig Latin and decode Pig Latin back into English. Two modes, one paste, instant output. The classic schoolyard rules are applied with care for capitalization and punctuation, so the result reads exactly like the Pig Latin you remember from grade school. Everything runs locally in your browser. Your text never leaves the page.
Pig Latin is built on two rules. They cover every word in English without exception, which is part of why the game survived a century of schoolyards.
Rule one. If a word starts with a vowel (a, e, i, o, u), append -way to the end. The word stays whole, and the suffix marks it as encoded. So apple becomes apple-way, open becomes open-way, and under becomes under-way.
Rule two. If a word starts with one or more consonants, move all of the leading consonants to the end of the word and add ay. The "leading consonant cluster" is everything from the start of the word up to (but not including) the first vowel. So pig becomes igpay, latin becomes atinlay, and the example phrase pig latin becomes igpay atinlay.
Worked examples for a paragraph:
Hello → Ellohayworld → orldwaybanana → ananabayquestion → estionquaystrength → engthstrayI → I-wayThe first rule varies from source to source. Reference works document -way and -yay; informal guides add -hay and a bare -ay.
-way is one of the two endings Wikipedia documents. This translator defaults to -way.
-yay is the other documented ending, and the one YourDictionary's guide teaches. apple becomes appleyay rather than appleway.
-hay turns up in informal guides rather than reference works. apple becomes applehay.
Some traditions skip the consonant entirely and just append -ay, so apple becomes appleay. This collides with rule two output for consonant-final encodings, which makes reverse translation harder. All four variants are valid Pig Latin. They are dialect, not error.
Rule two says to move "all the leading consonants." The interesting question is what counts as a consonant cluster.
This translator treats every consonant before the first vowel as part of the cluster. So:
school → oolschay (move sch)straight → aightstray (move str)thrill → illthray (move thr)squash → ashsquay (move squ, where qu is treated as a unit)The letter y is a special case. At the start of a word, y acts as a consonant: yellow becomes ellowyay. After other consonants, y acts as a vowel that ends the cluster: try becomes ytray, rhythm becomes ythmrhay. This matches the rule taught in most schoolyards.
Real Pig Latin preserves the visual shape of the sentence. The translator follows three rules:
First-letter capitalization is preserved. Hello becomes Ellohay, not elloHay. The translator capitalizes the first letter of the output word if the input started with a capital, regardless of which letter ends up first after the consonant cluster moves.
ALL CAPS is preserved. HELLO becomes ELLOHAY. The translator detects fully uppercase words and keeps them uppercase.
Punctuation stays in place. Hello, world! becomes Ellohay, orldway!. Commas, periods, exclamation marks, question marks, semicolons, colons, and quotation marks stay attached to the word they were touching in the input.
Encoding is deterministic. Decoding is not.
The reason is information loss. When school becomes oolschay, the decoder needs to know that the moved cluster was three letters long. It infers this by finding the next chunk of consonants before the final ay. That works for most words but not all. Consider oolschay. The decoder sees sch as the moved cluster, prepends it, gets school. Correct.
Now consider inay. The decoder doesn't know whether this came from nay (consonant n moved to give aynay... wait, that produces aynay, not inay). It actually came from in encoded with the rare -ay vowel suffix style. But the decoder, defaulting to -way for vowel-initial words, sees inay, peels off the trailing ay, and reads in as the consonant cluster, producing... no valid English word.
The translator's decoder makes the most likely guess: it assumes -way for vowel-initial words and the standard consonant-cluster move for the rest. For most text this produces correct output. For edge cases, particularly short words and abbreviations, you should re-read the decoded result.
Pig Latin is older than most people guess. References to "Hog Latin" as a name for playful English nonsense date to the 1860s. By the 1930s the game was familiar enough to play for laughs on screen, in Three Stooges and Our Gang shorts.
The name has nothing to do with actual Latin. It is a 19th-century joke about anything that sounded vaguely Latinate and meant nothing. Print mentions go back to 1866, when it was still called "hog latin", and by 1895 The Atlantic could describe "the well-known 'pig Latin' that all sorts of children like to play with."
Linguists call this kind of game a ludling: a language game built on systematic phonological transformation. English has Pig Latin. French has Verlan, which inverts syllables. Spanish has Jeringonza, which repeats each vowel with a p. Swedish has Rövarspråket. The urge to build a code outsiders cannot follow keeps reappearing, in playgrounds and in adult subcultures alike.
Pig Latin still turns up in three places.
Kid speech. Parents still teach it as a starter cipher and a way to discuss things in front of younger siblings. In Pixar's Monsters, Inc., Sully tells Mike to "ook-lay in the ag-bay" (look in the bag), a line a generation of kids recognizes.
Comedy and pop culture. Pig Latin shows up in The Simpsons, in the Three Stooges short Tassels in the Air, and in many cartoons that want to flag a secret. The joke is always the same: the characters think they're encoded, the audience instantly decodes, the laugh lands on the gap.
Light steganography. Pig Latin is occasionally used to hide a punchline in a written message, encode an answer in a puzzle, or scramble a hint in a scavenger hunt. It is not real encryption. Anyone over the age of seven who knows the rules can decode it instantly. But for casual obfuscation it works.
Two rules. Vowel-initial words get -way appended. Consonant-initial words have all the leading consonants moved to the end with ay appended. So apple becomes apple-way and pig becomes igpay.
Because -way is one of the two endings reference works document, and a translator needs one consistent default. The other variants are valid too.
Yes, but reverse translation is inherently ambiguous because the encoding loses information about word boundaries and original vowel positions. The decoder makes the most likely guess and preserves capitalization. For short words and edge cases, re-read the output.
Yes. Hello becomes Ellohay, not elloHay. Fully uppercase words like HELLO stay uppercase.
Yes. Commas, periods, exclamation marks, question marks, semicolons, and quotation marks all stay attached to the word they were touching in the input.
No. It is a ludling, the linguistics term for a language game based on systematic phonological transformation. It is not related to actual Latin in any way.