Ciphers · Old Russian secret writingLitoreya Cipher б↔щ
Litoreya is the secret writing of Russian scribes from the 12th to the 17th century, also called the tarabar script. Consonants swap places according to a two-row table, while vowels stay where they are. Encoding and decoding are the same action: paste a Russian text and the result appears at once.
Everything runs in your browser — the text goes nowhere
the table is symmetric: one action encodes and decodes
Text
Result
нмишек рим
The link will contain the text (up to 500 characters) and settings — share it with care.
02
Diagram
simple litoreya · 10 consonant pairs
БВГДЖЗКЛМН
ЩШЧЦХФТСРП
A letter swaps with the one above or below it. Letters of your text are highlighted.
03
How it works
Two rows of consonants
б в г д ж з к л м н / щ ш ч ц х ф т с р п
Twenty Russian consonants are written in two rows of ten. A letter swaps with its column partner: б ↔ щ, к ↔ т, м ↔ р.
Vowels stay
привет → нмишек
Vowels and й, ъ, ь are not changed. The text stays pronounceable and sounds like gibberish — hence its other name, “tarabar script”.
No key
twice = the original
The table is the same for everyone and works both ways. Litoreya hid a text from a casual reader, not from someone who knew the trick.
04
Frequently asked questions
An Old Russian secret writing used by scribes and clerks from the 12th to the 17th century, also known as the tarabar script. In simple litoreya twenty consonants form pairs, and each letter is swapped with its partner while vowels stay in place. There is no key: the table is the same for everyone, so it hid a text from a casual reader, not from someone who knew the trick.
Ten consonants are written in a row — б, в, г, д, ж, з, к, л, м, н — and ten more under them in reverse order: щ, ш, ч, ц, х, ф, т, с, р, п. A letter swaps with the one above or below it: б ↔ щ, в ↔ ш, к ↔ т, м ↔ р, н ↔ п and so on. The whole table is drawn in the diagram below the fields.
So the text stays pronounceable: «привет мир» turns into «нмишек рим», which sounds like words of an unknown language rather than a string of signs. Hence the name tarabar, meaning gibberish. The letters й, ъ and ь do not change either, since they have no pair in the table. That also makes litoreya easy to spot: vowels and word lengths stay the same.
Simple litoreya swaps consonants by a single two-row table, and the result is still written in letters. Wise litoreya was more complex: letters were replaced by symbols with dots, strokes and circles, and there was no single system — every scribe had his own. That is why only simple litoreya works here, while the wise kind is found only in manuscripts.
In scribes' notes in the margins of handwritten books: a copyist hid his name or a request to pray for him this way. Litoreya was also used in official and diplomatic letters of Muscovy in the 16th and 17th centuries. Later the tarabar script became a game, and it still appears in school olympiads, puzzle hunts and children's books about secret writing.
With the same operation as encoding: the table is symmetric, and each pair works both ways. Paste the text into the field, and the consonants return to their places while vowels and signs stay as they were. If the result still does not read, it may not be litoreya — try the “Identify a cipher” page, where litoreya is checked alongside Caesar and Atbash.