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 has regional variants, and which one you grew up with depends on where and when you learned the game.
-way is the most common variant in printed Pig Latin and the one used by most published children's books. It is also the variant Mark Twain reproduces in his Tom Sawyer correspondence. This translator defaults to -way.
-yay appears in some Midwestern and West Coast schoolyards. apple becomes appleyay rather than appleway.
-hay is rarer but appears in 20th-century American sources. 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 is one reason it's less common in print. 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 and used by Mark Twain.
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 appear in American newspapers as early as the 1860s. The specific rule set we use today, move the consonants and add ay, was popular among American schoolchildren by the early 20th century and was standardized in printed children's books and humor magazines by the 1930s.
The name has nothing to do with actual Latin. It is a 19th-century joke about anything that sounded vaguely Latinate and meant nothing. Thomas Jefferson reportedly used a related play language in private correspondence, though the rules he used differed from modern Pig Latin. Frank Sinatra and the Andrews Sisters recorded Pig Latin lyrics in the 1930s and 1940s. Mark Twain reproduces it in dialogue.
Linguists call this kind of game a ludling: a language game built on systematic phonological transformation. Pig Latin is the most famous English ludling. French has Verlan, which inverts syllables. Spanish has Jeringonza, which inserts -p- syllables. Swedish has Rovarspraket. The impulse to encode a shared in-group language is universal in childhood, and it keeps reappearing in adult subcultures too.
Pig Latin is no longer the dominant kid code it was in the 1950s. But it persists in three places.
Kid speech. Parents still teach it as a starter cipher and a way to discuss things in front of younger siblings. The Disney film Monsters, Inc. uses Pig Latin briefly. The "Igpay Atinlay" line is recognizable to a generation of kids.
Comedy and pop culture. Pig Latin shows up in The Simpsons, Family Guy, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and most 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 the most common variant in printed Pig Latin and the one used by Mark Twain and most published children's books. The other variants are valid regional dialects.
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. Pig Latin is the most famous English ludling. It is not related to actual Latin in any way.