About Smeedish

Smeedish was created by Chris Tickner in 1996 as a playful way to securely exchange notes with friends in elementary school without the teacher being able to read them.

Smeedish is an obfuscation method designed to make text difficult to read once it has been encoded (referred to as "ciphertext") until it has been decoded back into "plaintext." It is an incredibly simple "encryption" method intended purely for fun. The process works by shifting the spaces that separate words by one position and then randomly adding numerous "distractors" to the text to make it harder to interpret. The number of distractors can be adjusted using a "temperature" setting, ranging from 0 (no distractors) to 7 (21 or more distractors per word).

Smeedish "encryption" works exclusively with English text. It cannot encode numerical digits because they are treated as distractors and ignored during decoding. To include numbers, they must be spelled out fully (e.g., "eight" instead of "8"). Similarly, Smeedish reserves all uppercase letters for distractors, so the encoder automatically converts all text to lowercase. Random uppercase letters are then inserted into the encoded text and disregarded by the decoder. Additionally, all symbols are treated as distractors, except for sentence-ending punctuation such as periods, question marks, and exclamation points.

How to Use Smeedish

To use the tool, type any English text into the "plaintext" box. After a moment, it will automatically be encoded into Smeedish. Click "Copy" to copy the Smeedish ciphertext and share it with a friend.

To decode a Smeedish text, paste it into the "ciphertext" box at the bottom. A second later, the decoded text will appear in the "plaintext" box above.

Go back to use the tool.