Sherlock Holmes's Dancing Men Cipher

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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle invented and used a cipher in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men," which featured Sherlock Holmes, his famous detective [1]. It is a substitution cipher in which a letter is always represented by the same dancing man, with a flag to indicate the end of a word. Sherlock Holmes uses frequency analysis and some other clues to decipher the encrypted messages. Since the story does not cover all letters, this Demonstration uses additional characters from the free font GL-DancingMen-Org, by Gutenberg Labo [2].

Click the setter bar to write a message and see its representation in this cipher (up to 45 dancing men). Please note that in this cipher, a couple of letters followed by a space are not represented by a couple of dancing men; instead, they are represented by a single dancing man holding a flag. Therefore, when you click "space" after a letter, the dancing man corresponding to that letter will be replaced with the same dancing man holding a flag.