Atbash swaps every letter for its mirror: the first for the last, the second for the second to last, so a becomes z and b becomes y. There is no key, so encoding and decoding are the same action. Works with the English alphabet and with Russian, with or without Ё.
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Diagram
the alphabet and the same alphabet reversed
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
Letters of your text are highlighted.
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How it works
A mirror alphabet
a ↔ z · b ↔ y · c ↔ x
The first letter swaps with the last, the second with the second to last. Every pair works both ways.
The middle stays
Russian with Ё: п → п
The 33-letter Russian alphabet has a middle letter, п, that maps to itself. English has 26 letters and no middle.
No key
twice = the original
Atbash is simple substitution with a fixed table. Anyone who knows the cipher reads the text at once.
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Frequently asked questions
Write the alphabet twice, forwards and backwards, and replace each letter of the text with the one below it. In English a becomes z, b becomes y, m becomes n. Spaces, digits and punctuation stay where they are, and capital letters stay capital. The diagram on this page shows both strips and highlights the letters of your text.
The word hello becomes svool: h is the eighth letter from the start, s the eighth from the end. Run svool through Atbash again and you get hello back. The Russian words «шифр атбаш» become «жцко ямюяж» in the 33-letter alphabet. Type your own word into the box: the result appears at once, and the diagram shows each pair.
It depends on the letter Ё. With Ё the Russian alphabet has 33 letters: ё pairs with щ, ж with ш, and п in the middle stays itself. Without Ё there are 32 letters: ж pairs with щ, and п and р swap. Auto picks the alphabet with Ё; if your puzzle says without Ё, switch the alphabet and the result updates.
Exactly as you encode it: Atbash is its own inverse, because a mirror pair works both ways. Paste the ciphertext into the box and the result is the plain text. If it still looks like nonsense, try another alphabet. Not sure it is Atbash at all? Paste the text into the cipher identifier on the page with all ciphers.
Atbash was made for the Hebrew alphabet: its name joins the first, last, second and second to last letters, aleph, tav, bet and shin. It appears in the Book of Jeremiah, where Sheshach stands for Babylon. Today Atbash is one of the first ciphers taught in computer science lessons and used in children's puzzles, because it is easy to explain and check.
No. Atbash runs in your browser on your device: the text is not sent to a server and is not written into the page address. A link with the text appears only if you press Share yourself, and the note next to the button says what goes into it. The visit counter only knows the page was used, not what you typed.