Pig Latin Translator

The tool rewrites each word on its own, so paragraphs and line breaks stay as you typed them.

1. Type or paste English into the Input box.
2. Set Mode to English to Pig Latin, the default, or to Pig Latin to English.
3. Read the output. Only runs of letters change. Digits, punctuation, spaces and line breaks are left exactly where they were.
4. Press Copy, Download .txt or Use as input to send the result back in.

For example, Hello, world! becomes Ellohay, orldway!. Treat the English output as final, since encoding follows fixed rules, and the decoded output as a draft, for the reasons explained further down. Another example: Pig Latin is fun becomes Igpay Atinlay isway unfay. Notice that the capital P and the capital L each move to the front of the new word. The tool works on the letters A to Z only. Numbers and other scripts pass through untouched, and an accented letter counts as a break, so café is treated as caf followed by é.

Pig Latin is a language game, and its rules vary by region. This is the version the tool follows.

A capital at the start moves to the new first letter, so Smile becomes Ilesmay. A word in all capitals stays in capitals. Capitals inside a word are lowercased. An apostrophe splits a word in two, so don't becomes onday'tay. A word with no vowels at all, such as hmm, simply gains ay and becomes hmmay. Other versions add yay or hay to vowel words; this tool only uses way.

Encoding loses information: once the consonants are at the end, nothing marks where they used to stop. The decoder strips the ending and then moves the whole run of consonant letters before ay back to the front. That is correct only when the rest of the original word ended in a vowel. ellohay returns Hello, ananabay returns banana and ilesmay returns smile, but igpay returns gpi instead of pig, and ingstray returns ngstri.

Anything ending in way is treated as a vowel word with that ending removed, so orldway, from world, comes back as orld. Read the decoder output as a hint and fix the rest by eye. Hand-written Pig Latin is ambiguous in the same way, and no program can always recover the original. If you need a reliable round trip, keep your English source and only ever translate in one direction.

To learn to say it, take the sound before the first vowel, move it to the end and add the ending, speaking each word slowly at first. Say pig as ig-pay, then string as ing-stray. Spelling out loud is the hard part, so reading the written output while you speak helps a lot. Pig Latin is mostly for fun. Teachers use it to practise consonants, vowels and syllables, children use it as a secret code, and programming students write translators as an exercise, using the examples above as test cases. Despite the name it has nothing to do with Latin; the label echoes older jokes about mock-scholarly Latin. Similar games exist in many languages.

For other word play try the reverse text generator or the upside down text generator. To disguise a message more thoroughly, the Caesar cipher tool shifts the letters themselves, though neither method is genuinely secret.