Stories and guides about languages, ciphers, and translation.
Klingons say "Success!", Elves sing "Namárië", and Mandalorians say "Maybe we'll meet again." Here's how to say goodbye in fictional and historical languages — and why farewells are often the most emotional words in fiction.
Klingons ask "What do you want?", Dothraki ask "Do you ride well?", and Mandalorians say "You're still alive." Here's how to say hello in 25 fictional languages, ancient tongues, and codes — and what each greeting reveals.
Chinese characters aren't just pictures. Most combine a meaning clue and a sound clue. Here's how Chinese characters actually work — radicals, phonetic components, stroke order, and why about 3,000 characters cover most everyday reading.
The letter A started as an ox head. B was a house. Here's how the alphabet evolved from Egyptian-inspired symbols to Phoenician, Greek, Latin, runes, and finally emoji — a 4,000-year journey from pictures to letters and back again.
Endermen whisper, warble, and scream in a language that sounds almost human. Here's what fans have figured out about Enderman sounds, the "backwards speech" theory, and the Standard Galactic Alphabet hidden in Minecraft.
Gibberish isn't meaningless — the best nonsense languages follow strict rules so audiences can understand emotion without understanding words. We ranked the internet's favourite fictional gibberish, from Groot to Simlish.
Skyrim hides two very different scripts — the ancient Daedric alphabet on armour and shrines, and the claw-mark runes of Dovahzul on Word Walls. Here's how they differ, what each is used for, and how to read them.
From Dovahzul and Aldmeris to Jel and Ayleidoon, The Elder Scrolls is full of invented languages. We ranked every major Elder Scrolls language by how real it sounds — and what makes each one convincing.
A constructed language is designed on purpose; a natural one grows on its own. But the line between them is blurrier than you'd think — and some "natural" languages were engineered more than most people realise.
The Elder Futhark is the oldest runic alphabet — 24 symbols used by Germanic peoples for centuries before the Viking Age. Here's what each rune means, how the alphabet worked, and why "Viking runes" usually means something slightly different.
In Skyrim, dragons don't just speak their language — they fight with it. Here's a beginner's guide to Dovahzul, the dragon tongue: its alphabet, essential words, how Shouts are built, and how to write your own dragon phrases.
"Use your loaf." "Up the apples and pears." "Have a butcher's." Cockney rhyming slang hides everyday words inside rhymes — then drops the rhyme. Here's how it works, where it came from, and the most useful examples.