Hieroglyphics Translator: Write Your Name in Egyptian Hieroglyphs

How this hieroglyphics translator works

Type a name and each letter or sound is swapped for one hieroglyph from the “alphabet” that museums use in name activities. The signs are real Egyptian hieroglyphs, mostly single-sound (uniliteral) signs plus the lion for l, and each one is shown with its Gardiner number so you can look it up.

Turn on “sound it out” and the tool works by sound rather than spelling: ch, sh, kh, th and ck get one sign, a double letter is written once, and a c before e, i or y is written as an s. Everything runs in your browser.

Why this is not a real translation

Ancient Egyptians did not write English, and they did not spell the way this page does. Their writing mixed sound signs with word signs, and added unpronounced signs, called determinatives, to show what kind of word it was. Vowels were mostly not written at all, which is why scholars are not sure how the language sounded.

This is not a real translation. What you get is a transliteration: English sounds matched to the closest alphabet sign, the way museum activities and the Egyptians themselves handled foreign names. Treat it as a keepsake, not as an inscription. If a name matters for a tattoo, a monument or a publication, ask an Egyptologist.

The sign table and conventions

Different charts give different signs for the same letter, because English has sounds Egyptian lacked and the reverse. The tables directly under the tool list every sign this page uses, with its Gardiner number, what it depicts and its Egyptological letter, and they show the choices made for C, Q, V, X and Y and for the pairs CH, SH, KH and TH.

The Gardiner numbers come from Gardiner’s sign list, the standard catalogue used by Egyptologists, and the Unicode names of the characters carry the same numbers. That lets you search for any sign and confirm it for yourself.

What a cartouche is

A cartouche is an oval loop with a bar at one end that holds a royal name. The default layout here draws one around your name. Putting an everyday name inside one is only a keepsake style. The loop itself is drawn with CSS and in the PNG, not typed as a character, because the Unicode enclosure controls are not supported by most fonts.

In Egyptian writing, animal and human signs face the beginning of the line. This page follows that: the signs face left in the left-to-right layout and are mirrored to face right when you choose right to left.