💃 The Dancing Men Cipher
A Chicago gang's private substitution alphabet of capering stick figures, flags marking word-ends. Broken by Holmes with letter frequency — and turned against its owner in a single forged line. Playable on this site.
A code that hides in plain sight
The dancing men are a Chicago gang's private alphabet: little capering stick figures, one per letter, with a flag in the hand marking the end of a word — a childish scrawl that a wife dreads and a husband dismisses as nonsense. Its brilliance is camouflage; chalked on a windowsill, it looks like a schoolboy's doodle, not a death threat.
Holmes breaks it — and answers in kind
Holmes attacks it as any substitution cipher: the most frequent figure must stand for E, short repeated groups suggest known words like the wife's name, and message by message the alphabet falls. Then, in a masterstroke, he writes a reply in the same dancing hand to lure the killer to him. On this site the cipher lives on in the Dancing Men Cipher Bureau and the Cipher Sprint — the code you can actually write in.