About
The nyctograph was invented by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) on September 24th, 1891. It is a small card with square holes that allows its user to write in the dark — recording thoughts in the night without lighting a candle.
Carroll devised a companion square alphabet using only dots at the corners and lines along the sides of small squares. Every character includes a large dot in the North-West (top-left) corner as an anchor. No character uses the West side alone, keeping all symbols unambiguous. The system encodes all 26 letters plus shorthand characters for the, and, digit mode, letter mode, and date mode.
"All I have now to do, if I wake and think of something I wish to record, is to draw from under the pillow a small memorandum book containing my Nyctograph, write a few lines, or even a few pages, without even putting the hands outside the bed-clothes, replace the book, and go to sleep again."
— Lewis Carroll, The Lady, October 29, 1891
The Square Alphabet
Each symbol is drawn within a square. The large dot at the top-left (NW) corner is always present. Hover over a symbol to see its description.
Encoder
Type text below and press Encode (or Enter) to see it rendered in nyctograph symbols.
Character Builder
Click the corners and sides of the square below to toggle them on/off. The NW (top-left) dot is always present. The matching letter is shown on the right.