The Dancing Men Cipher is featured in Arthur Conan Doyle's 1903 Sherlock
Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Dancing Men".
In the narrative, Holmes encounters strange
drawings of dancing figures in a mansion, which he soon deciphers as a unique code where each figure
corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. The cipher is a simple substitution method
where each
letter is replaced by a humanoid symbol, with some symbols holding a flag to indicate the end of a
word—this system does not use spaces to separate words.
How it works:
Encrypting with the Dancing Men cipher involves substituting each letter with
its specific dancing figure, and decryption is the straightforward process of reversing this
substitution.
Conan Doyle's story uses 18 unique symbols to match the letters necessary for his
puzzle, omitting eight letters (F, J, K, Q, U, W, X, Z) with no corresponding symbols, though modern
adaptations sometimes include these letters with invented symbols.
The story describes Holmes using
frequency analysis to crack this monoalphabetic substitution, underscoring the cipher's simplicity
and vulnerability to basic cryptanalytic techniques. The Dancing Men Cipher, while not used beyond
its literary origin, provides an engaging and visually distinct method of encoding messages,
memorable for its creative use of dancing figures to conceal text.
